


if in a forest

by tin_girl



Category: Ouran High School Host Club - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Angst, M/M, Post-Canon, Underage Drinking, but if anyone reads this it will be for the romance right, not nearly enough politics, politics not even being the right word, so much drama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-08 16:41:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 35,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21831958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tin_girl/pseuds/tin_girl
Summary: Kaoru ends up telling Kyoya about Alice, and the world on the other side of the mirror. Looking Glass, he corrects himself, and speaks of rooms quite like here, only the paintings in them talking, the clocks with faces. All wonders, he adds, laughing at himself, remembering Hikaru, ten years old, eyes huge and the future like Humpty Dumpty in their clasped hands – as if, the moment they let go, it would break like an egg.“In other words, you’re scared,” Kyoya says, and Kaoru wants to throw something at him. Another difference, and he doesn’t want it – wants him and Hikaru to be the same, none of them hesitating before they leap, say a word, take a step.Or, Kaoru, Kyoya, and the love story they never asked for.
Relationships: Background Fujioka Haruhi/Suoh Tamaki, Hitachiin Hikaru & Hitachiin Kaoru, Hitachiin Kaoru/Ootori Kyouya, one-sided Ootori Kyouya/Suoh Tamaki
Comments: 100
Kudos: 157





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story will kill me unless I kill it first. Anyway, it's quite angsty and not like the original story in tone at all. Remember all that twin drama with Hikaru and Kaoru? It's that, only even more dramatic. It should have 10 chapters tops, probably less, and it's set after the manga, but if you haven't read it, it should be fine. After all, I myself haven't read it in years and the story might be/is full of inaccuracies, anyway. 
> 
> But in case you have read the manga, SPOILERS: I know they all go abroad for their last year of high school at the end, but in this story they stay in Ouran. 
> 
> In case you haven't read the manga and don't mind slight (?) spoilers: Tamaki and Haruhi are dating in this one (though it's barely mentioned), at some point in the manga Hikaru dyed his hair dark to help people distinguish him from Kaoru, and in chapter 47 one Hitachiin Kaoru called Kyoya cute which is a good enough reason to write a slow-burn fanfic about them, fight me. 
> 
> Anyway, enjoy!

‘You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking-Glass House if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond.’

~~ Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass & What Alice Found There

When Hikaru first dyed his hair, Kaoru felt like he had no one. He was left behind in some strange country, no map, no nothing.

But no one’s known me yet, he wanted to say, because sure, Haruhi could tell the difference between them, but the way she explained it, it was like she knew who was who because of certain qualities Hikaru had and Kaoru didn’t, good or bad, never mind that.

“How come,” he asks Kyoya then, one afternoon, frustration pulsing under his skin like something he couldn’t ever scratch out, “Haruhi can tell and not you?”

Ouran is a school of huge windows, and sunlight lazes around in the room, coloring things, so that it looks like everything in it is already old, half-eaten with rust. Maybe, Kaoru thinks, and almost laughs, this is the future, too quiet and echoes everywhere. Kyoya’s glasses glint, and, stupidly, Kaoru wonders if beneath the frames, his skin is pressed red. If, were he to take them off, Kyoya would be revealed as human at last, skin weary and sore.

But of course, Kyoya hardly ever takes his glasses off.

“I could always tell,” he says, without looking up from his laptop, and Kaoru’s heart twists like a curled fist, misses a beat, makes up for it. Is that, finally – “I just never bothered to.”

Kaoru laughs at that, knowing he sounds crazy, but God, the school empty after four, at least it’s some sound.

“Is that so,” he says, careful not to let his voice shake. He thinks, I’m alone, I’m alone, I’m alone, and Kyoya keeps typing, as if Kaoru is not worth taking a break for.

Pathetic, Kaoru thinks at himself, and wishes for rain, so that he could imagine the clack of keyboard as something else, imagine that Kyoya is looking at him, seeing something that’s just Kaoru’s. But, of course, outside the windows, there’s only that swollen, harvest sun.

*

“Kaoru,” Mori says, and Kaoru wants to put on a silly hat, and have him say it then, when it would mean something.

*

It’s only a show, of course, Hikaru breathing in his face and blushing like someone’s pinched him. Twincest! They said once, and laughed and laughed and laughed, holding onto each other so as to not topple to the ground. All that laughter, and Kaoru wonders if he’s sick whenever Hikaru steals the covers at night and he doesn’t mind.

It’s not romantic, it’s not sexual, but it’s _something._

Hikaru is the only one who knows which of them is Kaoru. Haruhi only knows which of them is and which of them isn’t Hikaru. That’s what the game is, after all.

_Which one of us is Hikaru-kun? _

Kaoru scolds himself, thinks, grow up. Identity crisis, for all those years, and he’s tired of it, wants to be over it already.

*

“You never got to figure it out, huh, Tono?” he says to Tamaki one day, because he’s masochistic like that. “Before Hikaru went and had his little teenage rebellion. One would think he’d choose something better than the cheapest hair dye you can find.”

It’s Slavic theme that week – _Russia!_, Tamaki said a few days before with stars in his eyes, thinking of gold, and onion domes, and tsars. _Petersburg!_ – and Kaoru is wearing a loose white shirt with red stitching. He pulls at the sleeve, and the fabric feels thin enough to tear, so he pulls harder, but the seams hold.

“It’s a humble thing to promote commoners’ products, Kaoru!”

“Oh?” Kaoru says, disinterested. He thinks, tired, of dozens of girls wanting to see him and Hikaru, never just him, and glances at the row of matryoshkas laid out on the piano. They are all smiling, paint chipped – true antics.

“Don’t tell Hikaru that,” Tamaki starts. A rarity – his voice serious, and his smile modest, like something everyday. “But the truth is, I’m still guessing! Of course, I know who’s who quite easily, now, thanks to the hair, but don’t think I’ve given up! I watch the two of you and try to think of what each of you does that the other won’t do.”

He smiles wider now, something brilliant and showy, and Kaoru can’t not smile back.

“I won’t try to steal Haruhi from you, for one,” he says, but it’s just that, a thing to say, because he knows Hikaru wouldn’t either.

Later, he stays behind in the empty club room and approaches the piano. He picks up one of the matryoshkas, and wonders if, upon opening it, he’d find not one smaller doll but two identical ones, and if the only way to tell the difference between them would be the chipped paint. He wonders, even though he promised himself he wouldn’t, if he’d be the chipped one.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?” Kyoya asks somewhere behind him, and Kaoru smiles, remembering that for Kyoya things are not beautiful but valuable.

“Costly, too, I’m sure,” he says, and imagines the conversation stretching lazily between them, club budget, Tamaki’s extravagance, what can you do.

“Do you know how many are nested inside?” Kyoya asks instead, and Kaoru wonders at how numbers don’t have to be about money. He considers the doll – it’s wearing pink, red and green, and her hair is the yellow of egg yolk – the good, almost orange sort that Hikaru likes to puncture with a fork after Kaoru fries it, color spilling on his plate. The matryoshka isn’t heavy, but it is considerably big, almost too awkward to hold with one hand.

“Five?” he guesses, and Kyoya laughs softly.

“Eight, actually.”

Kaoru smiles, shakes his head, and opens the doll. Inside there aren’t two smaller dolls, just one.

“People are like matryoshkas, then,” he says, and feels foolish. He’s been thinking of layers, how he’s hidden inside himself, and how no one bothers to open him and look.

When they first met, Hikaru tried to play the game with Kyoya, but Kyoya only pushed his glasses up his nose and ignored them. Kaoru bit his lip, back then, to keep from yelling.

“There are many clues,” Kyoya says now, coming up to stand next to him. He’s changed from his tsar costume, and it’s a relief to not see him in black and all that gold, which he wears too nonchalantly for it to not be that bit convincing. He takes the matryoshka from Kaoru and opens it, opens all of them, one by one, until the wooden halves are strewn on the piano like something has hatched out of each doll. The smallest one, the one that doesn’t open, he offers to Kaoru, and when Kaoru reaches for it, Kyoya grabs him by the wrist, not gentle, not harsh, just decided. “Your nails, for one.”

“I don’t bite them,” Kaoru says, embarrassed, because he used to, once, and no one noticed anyway, no one could tell them apart despite it.

“It’s your lunulae,” Kyoya explains, setting the doll on Kaoru’s palm and letting go of his wrist. Kaoru curls his fingers around the wood, and wonders what it is that he’s missing.

“Lunulae?” he repeats, irritated to be forced into admitting he doesn’t know the word. The one thing he both likes and hates about Kyoya is how, for all his arrogance, he doesn’t tend to assume people don’t know something. Or, rather, he doesn’t tend to assume Kaoru doesn’t know something, and Kaoru feels strange at the realization, exposed, like something with its feathers plucked away, naked and aching.

“Lunulae are the white half moons at the base of one’s fingernails,” Kyoya explains. “Hikaru has them, and you don’t, which, I suspect, is due to malnutrition. Hikaru might be the more spoiled one, but it’s you who never touches the greens. If you pulled your lower eyelid down, there wouldn’t be enough red there.”

For a moment, Kaoru doesn’t know what to say. He remembers telling Haruhi that he and Hikaru, they always like the same things and how it wasn’t a lie, not exactly, unless he’d been lying to himself.

“I eat lots of meat, though.”

“You don’t eat lots of anything, lately, do you?” Kyoya says, matter-of-fact. “Take care of yourself, would you?”

Kaoru has to remind himself, then, that Kyoya is saying that thinking of the club’s profits, always calculating.

“That’s how you can tell?” he asks, disappointed. To think it would be something as trivial as eating habits! “That’s it?”

“There’s more, naturally,” Kyoya says, and the smile he gives Kaoru is almost mischievous. “But let’s leave something for later, shall we?”

*

Sometimes, Kyoya will watch Tamaki, and Kaoru will watch Kyoya. There will be nothing wistful about it, no longing in Kyoya’s gaze, but Kaoru imagines it there all the same – just like those red lines he’s sure are under the frame of Kyoya’s glasses, present but well hidden.

Once, Tamaki told them about how Kyoya got a kotatsu just for him, and Kaoru thought that none of them really knew Kyoya, not at all. He remembers Kyoya searching for Tamaki’s mother, how he wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t sleep, and wonders if, were Kyoya to pull his own eyelid down, there wouldn’t be enough red there, either.

Take care of yourself, would you, he reminds himself, and laughs. He feels tired all the time, that much is true, and these days, he doesn’t ever bother to wash his mug, coffee rings forever inside it. His leg will jump under the table sometimes, but at least he doesn’t fall asleep during tests. Sleep, when it comes to him, feels like floating, and he both longs for it and tries to avoid it.

When I sleep, he told Hikaru once, when his brother found him in the kitchen in the middle of the night, eating cereal with a spoon, straight from the box, I dream of the future.

What is it like, Hikaru asked, rubbing sleep out of his eyes, and Kaoru tried to remember.

White, he said, finally, though that wasn’t it, not exactly. It’s all white.

“Hawaii!” Tamaki exclaims, on the other side of the room, and Haruhi argues that no, she’s not going to wear a grass skirt.

“How about Peter Pan?” Kaoru says, and imagines them as Lost Boys, imagines them never having to grow up. Kyoya raises his eyebrow at him, knowing, disdainful, aggravating, and asks who would be Captain Hook.

“Forget it,” Kaoru mumbles, and thinks of Earth spinning, countries all over it, imagines momentum scattering them everywhere against their will, and how no one would hold on to him to keep him from landing somewhere alone.

*

He and Hikaru are sharing a lunchbox, and while putting a piece of omelet in his mouth, Kaoru notices Kyoya watching him, almost smirking. Kaoru frowns, and eats a piece of cucumber next but it tastes like nothing, and really, he’s not hungry anyway, so he folds his chopsticks and pretends he’s eaten enough. Hikaru is too busy stealing glances at Haruhi to notice anyway, and Kaoru is almost alright with how it will have to be so now, always.

That evening, he picks up a copy of _Anna Karenina_ that someone’s left lying in the music room, because one week after, he’s still thinking of Russia. He decides, quite near the beginning, that Anna is the kind of person who, even if she had a twin sister, would never be mistaken for her.

*

“You observe,” Kyoya tells him finally, two weeks later, and Kaoru remembers the press of the smallest matryoshka in his palm, and how he stole it later, slipped it into his pocket and thought that, surely, Kyoya had known he would. “Hikaru does, too, but not half as much.”

“I do observe,” Kaoru agrees, not quite happy, but satisfied, which is almost better, and leans towards Kyoya, smiling knowingly. He doesn’t glance at Tamaki – he doesn’t have to – and knows, without Kyoya having to tell him, that it’s another difference between him and Hikaru, because in his place, Hikaru surely would.

“I wish you didn’t, sometimes,” Kyoya admits, and keeps himself from adjusting his glasses, even though they’ve slid down his nose. His hand twitches at his side, but he keeps it there, and Kaoru leans even closer, so that, at last, he sees the red pressed into the bridge of Kyoya’s nose. Before he can think about it, he pushes Kyoya’s glasses up for him with the tip of his finger, and, later, is glad that he did. After all, touching is more of a Hitachiin thing to do than refraining from it ever will be.

“Tell me more, tell me more,” he requests childishly, and smiles what he knows is his practiced, devilish smile. He knows, having had Hikaru for a mirror all his life.

“Greedy,” Kyoya says, and for some reason, Kaoru expects him to laugh. When he doesn’t, Kaoru feels disappointed, like a child pressing a button on the back of a broken toy, surprised at how it won’t speak.

“You have no idea,” he says, and goes back to his book, which he’s kept open with his finger. He stares at his hand, and thinks that for all the observing he does, he himself never notices other people’s fingernails.

*

It’s early afternoon, and Kaoru is already half-asleep, trying to keep his eyes from closing as he and Hikaru entertain one of the girls who always request them, the sort that read forbidden love story manga, hiding them under their pillows and pretending to like Proust. Kaoru stares longingly at the box of instant coffee on the other side of the music room, and his mug, forever dirty and chipped at the rim.

“…Kaoru!” Hikaru says, has been saying, and Kaoru realizes he’s been asked a question, and is supposed to swoon. He remembers how at night, he sipped milk, curled up on the kitchen windowsill, and wanted to call someone, but had no one to call.

“Is it a fever?” Hikaru says, voice exaggerated, but eyes wary. “Do you feel unwell?” He puts the back of his hand to Kaoru’s forehead, and Kaoru almost tells him that he’s supposed to check with his own forehead. It would be so much better for business and Kyoya – he glances at Kyoya, who isn’t watching them at all.

“I’m just a little hot,” Kaoru says, even though he’s not, and reaches up to undo the top button of his shirt.

“No, let me,” Hikaru plays along, batting his hand away, and popping the button open for him. Kaoru imagines what it would be like if he couldn’t push it through the cotton, and smiles, wondering if someone would mind if he curled up to sleep.

“Would the two of you care for a drink?” he says instead and gets up without waiting for a reply. He heads for the coffee table with no intention of going back and gathers the undissolved grains of his last coffee on his finger, too lazy to make a new one. He licks the grains off, someone giggling somewhere, maybe at him, maybe not.

“You should wash it, before it grows legs,” Kyoya says, appearing next to him, and Kaoru glances at his laptop, folded closed three tables away. Distracted, he doesn’t notice Kyoya prying the mug from his fingers until he hears the squeak of a washcloth.

“Sit down, would you?” Kyoya says, not bothering to look at him. “I’ll make you a proper coffee, and you’ll stop butchering our income.”

“We’re not paid for—”

“How many tissues that Hikaru’s used to wipe your tears away do you think we’ll sell if you don’t even bother to answer when he’s talking to you?”

“We only have instant coffee,” Kaoru protests, petulant.

“I’m aware,” Kyoya says, and Kaoru wonders if at home, Kyoya makes his own coffee, even though he has maids for that. He grunts in acknowledgment and slides down obediently, his back to the wall, wondering if the rumble of the kettle will lull him to sleep.

“It snowed at night, did you know?”

“It’s October,” Kyoya tells him, and after the splash of hot water in the mug, Kaoru can’t hear a thing. The spoon doesn’t clink when Kyoya stirs, not once.

“I swear,” Kaoru mumbles, and remembers how it was white, and too slow for rain. “When it fell, it made no sound.”

“A tree in a forest.”

Kaoru smiles and – though it’s not very smart – closes his eyes for a second, two, three.

“Schrodinger’s cat,” he says, and when Kyoya hands him the coffee, it’s as close to perfect as something from a tin can get, more milk than water, hot but not hot enough to scald, and just enough sugar. He hums contentedly, and slowly, slowly, feels himself waking.

“Cheshire cat,” Kyoya says, and Kaoru groans, remembering Tamaki in a hat and the clothes he and Hikaru had to wear, those awful prison-uniform stripes. He thinks, even though he doesn’t want to, of Lewis Carroll and Wonderland.

He thinks, because he’s always bound to, about mirrors.

“You have clients,” Kyoya reminds him, and Kaoru can see the outline of a calculator in his slacks pocket.

“How much sugar did you put inside?” Kaoru asks, licking his lips clean.

“Far too much.”

“Tell me,” Kaoru insists, knowing he sounds spoiled. “I want one like this every morning.”

“Hmm,” Kyoya says, and smiles, calculating, even though there’s nothing to calculate. “Here’s another; you like sweets more than Hikaru does.”

Kaoru blinks up at him and feels funny.

“I thought you wouldn’t bother,” he says, staring at his knees. He wants, more than anything, for this to go on, and so, masochistically, can’t resist provoking Kyoya into stopping.

“Clients,” Kyoya reminds him, matter-of-fact, and then turns to go, but stops. “If I bothered, you’d know,” he adds, and Kaoru imagines him saying something both awful and wonderful.

_If I bothered, you’d know, because I’d tell you things about you that you don’t even know yourself. _

He takes a sip of his coffee, and it’s almost easy to believe that Kyoya actually said it, and so Kaoru lets himself imagine he did, just for a minute, just for two.

*

When Kaoru wakes up later that night, for the first time in so long, Hikaru isn’t there. It’s cold, and Kaoru wraps a blanket around himself and pulls on his socks before investigating. The house, as he sneaks through the halls, is empty and quiet in a disturbing way, like a ship about to sink, all the rats long gone. When he was small, he used to fear the dark rooms and heavy, brass handles, and perhaps he hasn’t quite grown out of it yet, in spite of all the years of mischief and hide-and-seek.

He finds Hikaru in one of the upstairs bathrooms – because, naturally, the house has many – leaning over a sink, trying to re-dye his hair at the roots.

When they were small, one of the maids read to them, first _Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland_ and then _Through the Looking Glass & What Alice Found There. _Hikaru loved the latter one so much more, speaking of the world on the other side of the mirror, similar but not quite the same. “When you hold up a book, someone in the Looking Glass house does, too, but the letters are all wrong!” he told their mother later, fascinated, and Kaoru consoled himself by thinking that were they to face each other, copies of the same book in hand, the letters wouldn’t go the wrong way. They were from the same world, whether Hikaru wanted or not.

Only Hikaru didn’t want, and now here they are, water dripping and something between them that they’ve been dancing around for months.

“You’re hopeless,” Kaoru says, staring at the mess of dye in the sink and the puddles of water splashed all over the bathroom tiles, Hikaru’s socks soaked. Hikaru jumps and hits his head on the faucet, which Kaoru tries not to laugh at.

“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Hikaru chants, gaining volume, and rubs the top of his hair, making everything all that messier. Kaoru imagines laughing and going back to sleep, but he’s tired of all those things he keeps imagining and won’t ever do.

“You could have asked for help, you know,” he says, exasperated, and in the mirror, Hikaru blushes. Kaoru sighs, and steps forward, onto the wet tiles, sinking his fingers into Hikaru’s hair and gently pushing his head down. “Idiot.”

They don’t talk – too risky – and when Kaoru can’t keep a few tears from dripping down, he hopes Hikaru will think it’s the tap. None of them mentions it, and later, after they’ve cleaned up, and Hikaru’s hair’s dried, they curl up together like two question marks. Kaoru wishes for sleep, and refuses to count months, days and nights.

*

“Biology?” Kyoya asks, conversational, staring at the textbook Kaoru is keeping open above his face. He’s stretched on one of the sofas, and lets his leg dangle off it. Tired, and not particularly willing to look at Kyoya and whatever mean expression he’s wearing, he drops the textbook on his face.

“Biological interactions,” he says, slowly. “Commensalism, parasitism,” he adds, wondering if the latter applies to him and Hikaru, who doesn’t seem to need Kaoru half as much as Kaoru needs him.

“Neutralism,” Kyoya adds, playing along.

“I don’t believe in that one,” Kaoru says, even though it is listed in the textbook. “I don’t believe two organisms can interact but not affect each other in any way.”

“Now,” Kyoya says, and he sounds like he’s smiling. Kaoru feels tempted to look, but resolutely keeps the book over his face. “Don’t forget mutualism.”

Kaoru waves his hand lazily and doesn’t say anything. He hears footsteps and consoles himself by thinking that Kyoya wasn’t standing near enough to catch his sleeve and keep him from going, anyway. He slips his hand into his pocket and curls his fingers around the tiny Russian doll he keeps there, small enough to hide, big enough to comfort.

*

Yet again, Kaoru can’t sleep, and around him, the house feels like a robbed grave. His hand shakes as he flips his phone open and goes to his contacts, names blinking.

He stares at Kyoya’s number flashing in the dark and doesn’t dial. Instead, he digs out scraps of patterned fabric, and aligns them together, like puzzles, itching for a needle, wondering if he’s anything other than his blood.

*

“Kaoru,” Haruhi says, blinking up at him with huge eyes. “You seem tired, lately.”

Kaoru smiles, and remembers how once, he either liked Haruhi, or thought he did. He figured out, later, that he’d probably like Haruhi more if she was a boy pretending to be a girl, and not the other way around, which, of course, had nothing to do with Haruhi herself.

“It’s nothing,” he tells her, and knows it won’t fool her. Still, he smiles, and hopes it’ll be enough.

“Are you and Hikaru okay?” she asks, because it’s always about him and Hikaru, isn’t it?

“I’ll be alright,” he says, instead of joking about how oh, is she worried, my, my. “I promise.”

Across the room, Kyoya adjusts his glasses, and looks elsewhere, but Kaoru has caught him watching, anyway.

*

Kaoru ends up telling Kyoya about Alice, and the world on the other side of the mirror. Looking Glass, he corrects himself, and speaks of rooms quite like here, only the paintings in them talking, the clocks with faces. All wonders, he adds, laughing at himself, remembering Hikaru, ten years old, eyes huge and the future like Humpty Dumpty in their clasped hands – as if, the moment they let go, it would break like an egg.

“In other words, you’re scared,” Kyoya says, and Kaoru wants to throw something at him. Another difference, and he doesn’t want it – wants him and Hikaru to be the same, none of them hesitating before they leap, say a word, take a step.

*

“Say, Kao, has anyone done anything?” Hani asks him, voice sweet and a promise of threats hidden somewhere under. Kaoru smiles, and pretends that no, no, everything is fine.

Everything is fine.

*

It’s October, Tamaki with autumn leaves in his hair and the pond outside full of them, too. Some branches naked already, and Kaoru feels cold when he looks at them out the window, wants to wear a scarf indoors.

“Kyoya~” he whines and flings himself to the couch where Kyoya is sitting with notes scattered all around. Paper rustles beneath him and he stretches, his head in Kyoya’s lap, blinking up at him innocently. “I’m bored, and lonely, and cold,” he says, and somewhere, Hikaru laughs.

“You’re a pest,” Kyoya says, and sighs, as if resigned to it. “Do you want me to turn the heating up?”

Kaoru stares at him, caught-off-guard.

“What about the costs?” he asks, quiet, not bothering to make it sound mischievous, sly, impish. Next to them, he knows, Hikaru must be frowning, surprised, too.

“The school pays for the heating, remember?” Kyoya says, and Kaoru feels like he’s swallowed something bitter. He thinks of Tamaki, and kotatsu, and the tips of his fingers feel numb. “Besides, if you’re cold, some of our clients might be as well.”

“No, no, senpai,” Hikaru says, waving his hand. “Kaoru is just a baby.”

Kyoya stares down at Kaoru, impatient.

“Never mind, Mom,” he says, loud, spoiled, half-act, half-real, and gets off the couch, dusting off his slacks, even though there’s nothing on them. “I’ll head home, actually, if that’s alright. I don’t feel so well, to be honest.”

He walks away, and Hikaru doesn’t follow, because he must have heard the lie in Kaoru’s voice, must have realized that what Kaoru wanted was not to go home, but to be left alone.

*

A few days later, Kaoru wakes up to find the music room empty, the sun outside heavier than he remembers. There’s a text from Hikaru on his phone about how he had to follow Tamaki and Haruhi somewhere to keep an eye on them or some such nonsense, and to go home without him and “get some proper rest, seriously.”

Kaoru doesn’t reach for his bag, because he notices the two identical matryoshkas set on the windowsill. He wouldn’t normally – they seem half on display, half hidden, like a reluctant gift someone was not quite ready to offer but did anyway – only they’re such a lovely, winter blue, a contrast to the warm interior.

Kaoru considers ignoring them, just to be cross, but in the end, curiosity gets the better of him. Most of the things they have delivered to Ouran for their club activities, he knows – if Kyoya can get away with it, white lies to Tamaki and polite bargaining on the phone – are rented, not bought, and even if bought, resold soon after. Kaoru thought, when Kyoya let him keep the smallest doll, that it meant something, because like everything else, even such a tiny thing would cost them. Now, two matryoshkas lying about like this, he’s not so sure.

Only they’re hardly lying about, are they? There’s purpose to how they’re placed, so that they seem to smile at him from across the room, teasing. Kaoru walks up to them, shielding his eyes from the sun, and wonders if it’s a prank. He checks for traps and looks around, listening, but the only sounds he can hear are coming from outside, the faraway yells of students that are only now leaving for home.

Kaoru sighs, and starts opening the first matryoshka, the one on the right, wondering if he’ll find a note inside, instructions to some game the other host members decided to play, a hide-and-seek he’s late for.

The dolls are all identical, and he’s careful when the swollen wood of the smaller ones doesn’t want to give. He puts the side of his palm to it, pressing gently, the way Kyoya instructed them to do and Hikaru didn’t anyway, almost breaking one – another difference between them, and Kyoya never said. When Kaoru gets to the last, tiny doll, it’s the same as the biggest one, only a bit less detailed, dress white-blue, hair brown-red, not unlike his and Hikaru’s. Well, his. Kaoru sighs, and checks the other set, which doesn’t give easily, either. When he gets to the one-but-last doll, he remembers Kyoya saying that the smallest dolls are often compared to eggshells, and carefully wedges his fingernail between the two halves, slowly prying them open.

The tiny doll inside doesn’t match the rest, and Kaoru’s breath catches. He checks his pocket – empty – and wonder how Kyoya managed to steal it without waking him. He stares at the small, red-green doll winking at him from inside its wooden shell, and there’s a pain in his chest as he’s trying not to think that it means something, something about him, and Hikaru, and Kyoya. He makes a choked sound, and wonders if he’ll cry.

He pockets his doll, and puts the rest of the set back together, knowing that come tomorrow afternoon, they’ll be gone.

*

Next day after classes, he leans over Kyoya’s shoulder, numbers rolling on his laptop screen like something that will never end, and thanks him with a cheeky smile.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, Kaoru,” Kyoya says, fingers tapping, but there’s a ghost of a smile at the side of his mouth, and Kaoru will take what he can get. From where he’s standing, he can see the red pressed into the skin of Kyoya’s nose and thinks that it will be quite difficult, now, to forget that Kyoya is human like he used to do.


	2. Chapter 2

'And can _all_ the flowers talk?’

~~ Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass & What Alice Found There

I know you, someone whispers in Kaoru’s ear, only he hears it from faraway, from everywhere. I know the you that’s inside yourself, who’s inside yourself, who’s inside yourself.

Then Kaoru wakes up – kicked off the bed as is usually the case, the clock on the bedside table blinking 3 am – and doesn’t manage to fall back asleep, no matter how hard he tries.

*

The next time it happens, it’s 4 am instead, and Kaoru listens to Hikaru snore for three minutes before stalking down the hallway and into the bathroom. He opens the window and climbs onto the windowsill, the grounds outside mere outlines in the dark and no soul in sight, cameras turning every now and then with a robotic noise, tiny lights blinking red.

To keep bad people out, their maid told them once, when they were small, and to keep the two of you in.

He remembers Hikaru, nine-years-old, world-hungry, trying to run away without Kaoru one spring evening, and how Kaoru thought that he’d be the twin who stayed all his life, the invisible thread between them stretching, stretching, and would it snap? Of course, later Hikaru came back crying after getting as far as the front door, the lock there too much of a challenge for his clumsy fingers.

When Kaoru dials Kyoya’s number, he tells himself that it’s because Kyoya is likely to still be awake anyway. He doesn’t know what he’ll say if Kyoya picks up, and it startles him when Kyoya does, a “yes” so close to Kaoru’s ear he almost feels a breath there, a not-quite-warmth on skin.

“Hello,” he says, stupidly. He grips the phone, hard, and wonders what it was that he meant to do, calling Kyoya out of the blue like this. There’s a tangle of thoughts in his head, nesting dolls, coffee, and something about understanding.

“Kaoru,” Kyoya acknowledges, and he sounds so hoarse that Kaoru wonders if maybe he had been sleeping, after all. “What is the matter?”

Something always has to be the matter, then, Kaoru muses, and wants to pretend he’s someone else. He imagines putting Hikaru on like a well-matched suit, and almost has the energy to try and trick Kyoya into not recognizing him.

“I,” he starts, with no idea how to finish. He listens to the quiet on the other end, helpless, wishing Kyoya would speak for both of them, but then, Kyoya hardly ever speaks even for himself. The quiet stretches, and Kaoru feels it like hunger, a lack that something seems to helplessly clench around. Were it anyone else, Kaoru would check if the connection’s broken, but with Kyoya, there’s no telling how long the silence can go on. It has nothing to do with awkwardness, after all, but, most likely is, in some twisted way, all about a sort of profit.

Kaoru has nothing to offer, and so, when he hears the intake of breath on the other end as Kyoya opens his mouth to say something, like a coward, he lies.

“I misdialed,” he says, before Kyoya can, in some polite, too formal way, ask him to stop wasting his time.

“Ah,” Kyoya says, and he doesn’t sound smug, or even knowing, just flat. “I’ll hang up, then, if that’s all right with you. Goodnight, Kaoru.”

It’s only after the phone clicks, the call disconnected, that Kaoru realizes, laughing at himself, that he wanted something from Kyoya even then, after choking out that stupid lie, a _at this time?_ or something similar, anything to keep the words going, slow, slow, like water lapping at sand, until he’d feel calm, or maybe even alright.

He wants, more than anything, to be back in bed with Hikaru, who’s warm and familiar and still at least half his, but he’s too tired to move, limbs sagging, and so keeps sitting curled on the windowsill until, at last, he drifts off into a restless sleep.

*

When he wakes, two hours later, almost tumbling to the bathroom tiles, there’s a text message from Kyoya blinking on his phone.

_Two spoons of coffee, three spoons of sugar, and 1/3 glass of milk_, it says, and Kaoru smiles, but when he makes the coffee per instructions, it doesn’t taste quite as nice as the one Kyoya made for him that one time, somehow.

*

“Why, we’re explorers, of course,” Tamaki tells one of their regulars, calling her a princess, face too close to hers, and Kaoru wonders if she can smell cake on his breath – they ate it before, a slice each, which Kyoya frowned at, calculator in hand. “Around the world in eighty days – we can go for our honeymoon—”

“It’s one hundred and eighty,” Kyoya corrects him, and Kaoru wants it all to last forever. There’s a Humpty Dumpty in his thoughts, sitting on a wall, kicking his legs, still whole.

“Wasn’t it supposed to be Indiana Jones?” Hikaru mumbles next to him, adjusting his leather hat. “I thought it was supposed to be Indiana Jones.”

Kaoru glances at Kyoya, because lately, he keeps glancing at him, light catching on glasses across the room and Kaoru staring like he’s a moth hungry for the glare. He wants something from Kyoya, still, answers to some dozen questions he hasn’t thought of yet, solutions to problems he doesn’t yet know of. He wants Kyoya to stop counting money and throw a coin so that it’ll spin and spin and spin, holes shot through the air, head or tails, and then to tell Kaoru what it means, because Kyoya, of all people, would know.

He considers walking across the room, but Hikaru’s at his side, ready to be suspicious, the lines of his face always quick to twist into a frown. If they’re a mirrored image, Kaoru is the reflection, and reflections never go wandering off first.

When he does wander off eventually, he decides to be Hikaru. It only fits, since it’s Hikaru who’s usually walking off, his back to Kaoru and shoulder blades like something cracked open. They’re both wearing leather hats, the brim wide, hair hidden and shadow thrown over their faces like they’re about to be revealed as someone else, a plot twist in the story, and Kaoru might have a shot at cheating himself into his brother just this once.

Mischief, mischief, he thinks to himself, and folds Kyoya’s laptop closed. Kyoya’s hands hover, fingertips so close to the computer that for a moment Kaoru wonders at himself and how he didn’t think of smashing them.

Kyoya’s nails, he notes, don’t have lunulae either.

“Kaoru,” Kyoya says, glancing up at him over the rim of his glasses, less sharp than usual, like a too-oft used knife. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Kaoru smiles, because he thought Kyoya would say, I haven’t saved the file.

He stops smiling, because he thought Kyoya would say, Hikaru.

Is that it, then? he wonders. Is that how Kyoya always knows it’s him? He talks of nails, and liking sweet things, but maybe it’s just that Kaoru is always the one to stay late in empty rooms, fall asleep on his feet and seek Kyoya out in desperate search for something, like a dog digging through trash. God, but Kaoru must reek of it, the stink of loneliness clinging to him and everyone able smell it but himself.

“You hesitated just then,” Kyoya explains, taking mercy on him, glasses pushed up, shoulders straightened, cuffs clean. “When you almost smashed the screen on my fingertips, you hesitated. Hikaru would have closed it faster.”

But he _didn’t _hesitate.

Did he?

“The skin on your knuckles is softer, too,” Kyoya continues, voice low, and Kaoru feels pathetic, like it’s all out of pity. “From some sort of cream, I imagine, which Hikaru wouldn’t bother to use.”

“Stop it already, would you?” Kaoru says, dry and no honorific. The sky outside the windows is already orange-pink, like salmon meat, and maybe a few coffee tables away Haruhi is thinking of food, but all Kaoru can think of is skinned flesh. He feels transparent, and frustrated – he wanted this, didn’t he? And now—

“Finally,” Kyoya continues, and it must be a punishment, only for what? There’s a shape of a tiniest nesting doll in Kaoru’s pocket and Kaoru wants to forget about it and throw the trousers away, say it’s because they were worn at the knees. “Hikaru would never close my laptop like that.”

Kaoru imagines pushing something to the ground, and there is all that china around that makes him think that drinking tea is like sipping from eggshells.

That everything they do is eggshells.

“You’ve just said that Hikaru wouldn’t hesitate—” Kaoru protests, voice cracking like something out of use.

“Did I?” Kyoya says, and smiles in his cold way, mouth set like something that wouldn’t give even if you poked it, which makes Kaoru want to dig his finger there, just to see what would happen, if indeed nothing would. “When you came here, you weren’t angry.”

Kaoru sighs, and turns around, eyes catching on Tamaki like he’s a car crash. Long limbs, brown leather, a smile like an eclipse, and Kaoru remembers being ready to break hearts for that smile, even his own. They were all ready to, once.

“Do you remember their first date?”

“It wasn’t that long ago,” Kyoya says, amused, as if nostalgia is but a confused fly he can easily swat away. “It’s a happy ending, isn’t it?”

“If it’s an ending, we’re loose ends,” Kaoru says, glancing at Kyoya over his shoulder, and remembers talking to him in empty rooms and how Kyoya might pity him for it, but seeks out those lonely minutes himself, like he doesn’t know anything else, doesn’t know how not to.

“It’s Tamaki’s happy ending,” Kyoya says, already opening his laptop anew, fingers flying over the keyboard like startled moths, glasses askew again. Kyoya’s never been generous with his time, and Kaoru hates how he’s had minutes, and minutes, and minutes, but thinks of hours. “Me, I’m still in the middle.”

“Oh, is that so?” Kaoru says, and wants to do something stupid, lie down on Kyoya’s laptop and stretch, steal time away from him in plain sight, rip it out of his hands and swallow it like a half-eaten fruit. “Where am I, then?”

Kyoya doesn’t stop typing, and later Kaoru will consider it and realize what it must have meant – that even when he doesn’t have Kyoya’s full attention, somehow, he still has it.

“I wouldn’t know,” Kyoya says, and Kaoru almost convinces himself that he sees numbers reflected in his glasses, because if he doesn’t see Kyoya’s eyes behind them, he can keep on having this little fantasy that Kyoya is looking at him, hands only pretending. “It’s hard to say, perhaps because you haven’t even begun yet.”

Kaoru blinks and feels his eyelashes brushing together, doesn’t want to open his eyes again and see the room into being. He knows that what Kyoya means is that Kaoru is standing still, and in their world, not moving forward is moving backwards.

“I’m not a story,” Kaoru says, trying to sound bored, something stuck in his throat like phlegm.

“No,” Kyoya says, and Kaoru hears it even though it never comes – _you’re an equation. _“I never said you were.”

“How—” Kaoru starts, and thinks that if they’re all an equation, he and Kyoya must be the reduced unknowns.

Kyoya glances at him at last, expectant, or maybe just impatient, get it over with and let me work.

“—Kind,” Kaoru finishes for lack of a better word, and then realizes that there really isn’t a better word, as surprised at himself as Kyoya looks, the glow from the laptop screen coloring him blue and eyes wider than ever.

Why kind? He wonders as Kyoya must wonder, and doesn’t know, even though something inside him is sure. It is that certainty that makes him smile wide, easy, arguments forgotten.

He looks at Tamaki across the room again and thinks of happy endings, but doesn’t say anything, Hikaru taken off and folded away like an ill-fitted jacket.

“Indeed,” Kyoya says, and smiles in a way that Kaoru hasn’t seen him smile in months, like there’s a chessboard between them and like Kaoru has a chance at winning. He knows, then, that it’s a riddle for later, and smiles back, knowing better than to ask. He’s learned patience over the years, and he keeps all his question marks in his pocket, waiting for a better moment, a better day.

“Customers, Kaoru,” Kyoya reminds him, and Kaoru bows theatrically, taking his hat off and near sweeping the floor with it, an unspoken affirmation for Kyoya that he’s guessed right, as if Kyoya had to guess, as if he needs it.

*

They sell photos and they’re all stored on Kyoya’s laptop, full of hidden folders and passwords that don’t mean anything, can only be jumbles of numbers and letters. They each have millions, but Kyoya considers printing costs anyway, and says that the challenge is not in having a fortune, not even in making it, but in maintaining it.

Still, if Tamaki wants expensive flowers that don’t fit the décor of the music room, Kyoya says yes, the _yes_ lost between the cold _no_s to all the things Kyoya won’t indulge him with. No one realizes, of course, what with the calculators, and the notes, and the uncapped pens but—

You observe, Kyoya said, and Kaoru knows of flowers even though Hikaru’s grown out of them, bored with petals and stems and ribbons.

“You’ve gotten kadupul flowers delivered here,” Kaoru whispers, shaking his head, and thinking that for all his IQ, Kyoya may well be the stupidest of them all. “And he doesn’t even realize!”

Somewhere behind him, Tamaki is bowing, arms scratching parabolas in the air, excess of words out of his mouth, unaware.

Kadupul flowers often die as soon as they’re picked, and only bloom once after being ripped from the ground – at night. Kaoru, for all their wealth, has never seen one, much less had a whole bouquet tied with a ribbon and offered with a lazy wave of a hand, and he hates, and hates, and hates, because Tamaki is not the only one who loves flowers.

He hates so much that he lies to Hikaru, sneaks away, stays at school, hides behind doors. He holds the key to the music room up his sleeve and waits in silence pregnant with something until the sun hides and the flowers dare to bloom. The door creaks but, inside, Tamaki doesn’t turn around where he’s crouched with his back to Kaoru, arms around his knees, watching the bouquet like he won’t even blink for fear of missing something.

Wrong, then, Kaoru thinks. I was wrong.

“Amazing, isn’t it? What Kyoya can do with a few phone calls,” Tamaki says, soft, as if he’s scared he’ll spook the flowers into premature death, and Kaoru imagines them shy, only daring to open at night when no one watches, no one but people like him and Tamaki who bother, even though the world keeps on spinning and spinning, and this refusal to spin with it may throw them off balance until their bones crack on things and ache.

Kaoru feels childishly wronged, because he’s always thought of Tamaki as someone who has the crowds, and wanted empty rooms and empty buildings for himself.

“They’re priceless, you know,” Kaoru tells him, out of spite, and Tamaki only smiles, because of course he knows. There is only one thing he doesn’t know, and that makes Kaoru angrier yet, that Tamaki can see how much Kyoya will do for him, but won’t see why.

“Everything beautiful is,” Tamaki says, in that exaggerated way of his, and Kaoru clicks his tongue, because there are beautiful things they can pay for all around, other flowers, furniture that doesn’t have a match anywhere in the world, china that they try not to break not because it’s expensive, but because it’s one-of-a-kind. He remembers one of those flowery phrases Tamaki reuses like a shopping bag, how nothing beautiful can last, only teacups can, paintings can, pianos can, but a kadupul flower won’t, and yet Kyoya gave a dozen of them to Tamaki, not knowing if he’d bother to stay and see them open, even.

Only he must have known.

Kaoru sits down next to Tamaki and they spend hours in silence – how rare – watching the petals unfurl, the night like a velvet glove around them, teasing them with sleep. At dawn, the flower near-withered, Tamaki straightens his sleeves, and talks of showers, and pressed uniforms, and untouched homework., the sky blushing pink as he goes home. When the door clicks closed, Kaoru picks one of the flowers and presses it between the pages of a textbook, because it’s too cruel to have it die so, slowly drying into brown and wrinkling like an old face, and wonders if somewhere in the Ootori residence there is a photo of Tamaki similarly hidden and crashed by a book, printing costs notwithstanding, numbers on some torn off piece of paper slightly off.

But then, ordering flowers that are priceless, and so, not worth it, might well be the only sentimentality Kyoya will allow himself.

*

“Haruhi,” Kaoru says after some deliberation, tapping the tip of a pencil against his lip with every syllable of her name. It’s breaktime, and she’s already started on their homework for tomorrow, neat lines of scribbled numbers in her notebook and a frown between her eyebrows that Tamaki would stare at for three minutes before poking it.

“Kaoru,” she replies, not aggravated yet, strangely amused if anything. He smiles, a small thing she won’t see, focused as she is on calculus.

“Do you care for flowers at all?”

Haruhi, for what it’s worth, stops scribbling, and puts her finger where she stopped, as if she’ll remember her trail of thought later if she pins the last number to the page.

“Flowers?” she says, raising an eyebrow at him. “I suppose they’re nice, but I don’t have any strong feelings about them, not like you all do.”

“I don’t know that we all do,” he says, and continues to tap the pencil against his lip, wondering if the graphite will smear there if he does it long enough. “Except for Tamaki, that is. Hikaru has no interest in flowers, for one, and I doubt Mori-senpai does.”

“I don’t like them cut,” Haruhi says, and Kaoru thinks of how in their world, flowers are always cut, arranged into bouquets, stems snapped at an angle. “Anyway, where did that come from?”

“Oh Haruhi, I’m just making conversation,” he says, and waves his hand in a bored manner, hoping she’s counting in her head, holding on to that equation, thoughts busy. “Don’t be rude.”

“You’re the one who’s being rude, bothering me! If you’re bored, you might as well help me with this,” she says, staring at him sternly, and pushing her notebook his way.

“My, my, you, a top student, asking me for help?” he teases, and regrets it already because it’s taken a while, for Haruhi to ever even think of asking for help in anything. Stupidly, it makes him think of Kyoya and how he still won’t.

“I’m only the top student because you and Hikaru are too lazy to bother,” she sighs, which is half-true, and he grins at her, whining about how he’s too tired to help her, because he knows that in a minute she’ll figure it out on her own and her smile will be all the wider for it.

*

“Let’s play a game,” he says, stretching over the table where Kyoya’s papers are strewn more carelessly than usual, a pen digging into his back.

Kyoya sighs, and leans slightly back in his chair, light reflecting off his glasses. It’s no longer as threatening as it seemed once, and only makes Kaoru smile wider, the itch to aggravate at his skin, the old need to have people pay attention to him settling into him, familiar.

“I’m in the middle of doing something, if you haven’t noticed,” Kyoya says, voice leveled, and when he adjusts his glasses, Kaoru grins.

“I’ve noticed,” he says, making sure to sound bored, and then stretches like he wanted to do days ago, notes rustling beneath him and maybe he’ll smear some not-yet-dry ink, what fun that would be!

“Get off, then,” Kyoya says, matter-of-fact, and Kaoru considers rolling off the table in such a way that the papers would go flying, but stays put.

“Are you not at all curious about the game?”

Something sharp digs into his side and he yelps and strains away from the shock of it. Kyoya slips a pile of papers from under his back before Kaoru can return to his sprawl over the desk, and when Kaoru glances at his hand, Kyoya’s holding a pen that he dug into the spot under his ribs, uncapped.

“Rude!” Kaoru whines, making sure to sound scandalized.

“Whereas you’re all manners,” Kyoya comments, flat, and flips through the file.

“If you guess my favorite flower, I’ll keep my hands off your papers and off your computer, indefinitely.”

“That’s hardly a game. It’s just a condition.”

“It’s a game,” Kaoru insists, and turns onto his side, watching Kyoya in a way that would make just about everyone else uncomfortable, without looking away once.

“I could blackmail you into leaving my papers alone in about twelve different way on the spot,” Kyoya says, smirking in that mean, arrogant way of his, which makes Kaoru smile back because, at last, some attention.

“Indulge me,” he says, childish, childlike, and folds his palms together like there’s a fly snapped dead between them.

“You know,” Kyoya says thoughtfully, fingers curling loosely around the pen. “Be careful or I might just start liking Hikaru more.”

It’s a joke, Kaoru knows – quite unexpected from Kyoya – but it still flies through his mind, _so then you like me more, now?_ He slides off the table, then, because it’s pathetic how he wants to arch against the words like they’re something physical and he can’t stand how with one look at his face, Kyoya would know.

Still, Kyoya must think him pathetic, anyway, because when Kaoru’s about to walk away, he asks, voice measured and quiet, if it’s forget-me-nots.

“No one’s forgotten me,” Kaoru says, glaring over his shoulder and for a moment, Kyoya looks taken aback before he composes himself into indifference.

“I just meant that—” Kyoya starts, but never finishes, which might just be the first for him. Kaoru blinks at him, surprised, and then stalks off, thinking of tying a ribbon into Haruhi’s hair, laughing at Tamaki, and Hikaru somewhere, smiling at him like when they were nine, like when they were eleven, like they’re still fifteen.

*

“Kao-chan?” Hani says, and Kaoru wraps his arms around his knees tighter, thinking, stupid, stupid, stupid, why the hell would he ask Kyoya to guess his favorite flower when Kyoya doesn’t care and when Kaoru doesn’t even want him to care in the first place.

“Do you want some chocolate?” Hani holds out a half-eaten block of milk chocolate, already melting where bitemarks are pressed into it, and smiles sweetly. “I can share!”

“Senpai,” Kaoru says, slow, chin propped on the top of his knees and the world disappearing whenever he blinks, “I’m tired of myself.”

“Oh,” Hani says, plopping down on the bench next to him. “Maybe just take a rest, then, Kao-chan,” he says, patting him on the shoulder, and Kaoru can’t help it – he laughs.

*

The last of the girls gone, decorations strewn everywhere like after a birthday party, Kyoya holds out a mug of steaming coffee, fingers curled around it nonchalantly despite the heat.

“Is it an anemone?”

Kaoru looks up at him, and takes the mug through the sleeves of his sweater, dragging the fabric down and over his palm so the porcelain won’t sting. Kaoru is so surprised by the coffee and by Kyoya bothering to guess that for a few lazy, blessed seconds, he doesn’t think of flowers at all, Kyoya’s fingers flushed red and the glasses crooked on his nose. Then he takes a sip, burns his tongue, and remembers.

“Ah,” he says, smiling meanly. “For forsaken love, hmmm?”

Yet again, Kyoya seems taken aback, and Kaoru wonders at all those firsts.

“For anticipation,” Kyoya clarifies, one hand in the pocket of his slacks, pose more relaxed than usual, which, somehow, makes him seem all the more tense. “You seem to be waiting for something.”

“Me? Now?” Kaoru asks, puzzled.

“You, always.”

Kaoru slurps his coffee like boys of his social standing never should and licks milk off his lips like he always does, remembering how once, Kyoya used to smirk more. It’s like he’s settled into something more tranquil, bones allowed to rest into some shape he’s not yet comfortable with, not having known anything else. Times of peace, Kaoru thinks, times of wealth, only not for him, not for Kyoya, and maybe what he’s settled into is resignation.

There are rose petals all over the floor, all of it for Tamaki, but Kaoru doesn’t say, because Kyoya wouldn’t.

“You’re wrong,” he tells him instead, and grins over the rim of his mug, pretending the petals aren’t there, and that they don’t have to walk all over them, that the floor has already been swept.

*

“It’s getting cold,” Hikaru says, and adjusts Kaoru’s collar, like a fussing mother, all the while pretending he isn’t.

Kaoru wants to stop thinking of kotatsu, and Tamaki, and how the music room will always be full of roses, even when everything outside dies from frost.

*

The change of plans is more sudden than ever before, Tamaki learning that the 4th of November is The King Tut Day on the 3rd, looking up at Kyoya with big eyes. Kyoya grumbles something about wishing they’d discovered the tomb at least on the 5th, but links his fingers and pushes his palms out, causing his knuckles to make a cracking sound, and gets to work. It’s the shortest notice yet, and Kaoru shakes his head, pretty sure that they’ve already done Ancient Egypt once, anyway. Kyoya rubs his eyes when he thinks no one’s looking, and when he catches Kaoru watching, he tells him that he and Hikaru will be the twin lion gods, Tefnut and Shu, since they have leftover animal costumes stored somewhere. He frowns, something apologetic about it, and Kaoru wonders if it’s because Kyoya knows they’re both tired of being parts of a set, him and Hikaru.

“Which one will I be?” Kaoru asks, and Kyoya sighs, exasperated, halting his typing long enough to answer.

“One is the goddess of water, and the other the god of air. Twins and married,” he explains, and then frowns at the connotations.

“So I’ll be the girl, then,” Kaoru says.

“I was thinking Shu, actually. Less solid, air,” Kyoya says, distracted, and then resumes typing, fingers flying so fast that they should trip, so fast that Kaoru wishes Tamaki taught Kyoya to play the piano because, surely, if he did, Kyoya would be able to play just about anything.

“But then, maybe rain fits you,” Kyoya adds, and Kaoru wonders if he should be offended or thankful, imagining himself falling.

They’re already back home, him and Hikaru, when Kaoru lies that he forgot his English homework at Ouran. He walks back instead of taking the limousine, and doesn’t know what he wants to prove by going, so he shoves his hands in his slacks pockets and pretends he really did forget something, whistling to himself and hunching his shoulders, the early evening too cold for the sweater he’s wearing.

Upstairs, in the music room, he expects to find no one, but Kyoya is still there, slumped asleep on the couch, the laptop screen not yet gone dark.

“Really,” Kaoru sighs, and considers letting Kyoya sleep. He looks like he needs it – cheeks pale, eyelashes casting shadow, the skin under his eyes a sickly color of too many nights and days spent staring at screens – but Kaoru knows Kyoya will be mad at himself if he doesn’t finish whatever he’s been doing, and can’t stand the thought, somehow.

He makes coffee, first, and wonders if it’s as hard to wake Kyoya up in the afternoon as it is in the morning. He makes it black, because he knows that’s how Kyoya drinks it – strong and bitter, as if it’s not an indulgence but a means to an end. Kaoru regards it, steaming in the nicest teacup they have, and laughs at himself as he puts a lone biscuit on the saucer.

Instead of shaking Kyoya awake, he lets him have five more minutes of sleep, observing his thin wrists with wonder – as bony as Haruhi’s, and even paler, a watch loose on one even though it’s fastened as tight as it goes – and then pokes him with a broom. When Kyoya jerks awake, there’s the comfort of a coffee table between them, but Kaoru only feels stupid, because all Kyoya does is blink at him in consternation.

“Ah,” he mumbles, rubbing sleep out of his eye as the laptop screen finally goes black. “Thank you,” he says, sounding unsure, and then spots the coffee. He stares at it as if he’s never seen one before, and then he almost-smiles, a quirk of the very corner of his lip.

“It’s already eight, senpai,” Kaoru says, and feels sudden anger. He imagines Tamaki at home, drinking tea, unbothered, and wants to hate him, but knows that later Tamaki will tell all the world how amazing Kyoya is, and what a great friend he has, influential people charmed with Kyoya’s name as Tamaki compliments their perfume and tie patterns, as he plays a sonata and says that his friend picked it for him and don’t they know him? Ootori-san’s youngest, and oh, how lucky Tamaki is to have him.

Only he doesn’t have him, even though he could, and so, unable to be angry at Tamaki, Kaoru feels angry at Kyoya instead. Pathetic, he thinks, and his fingers curl into a fist.

_That’s the real you_, he thinks, glaring at Kyoya whose hair is sleep-mussed and whose eyes are blurry-looking, like he hasn’t blinked whatever he dreamt off away yet. _Someone who stays behind and falls asleep with a stiff neck. _

“Now, Kaoru, don’t look at me like that,” Kyoya says, and he’s nothing like he seemed when they were just people dragged into the same club, not a devil, not cold, not made of shadows. He looks like someone who’d get drunk if the world let him.

“Do you have a lot left to do?” Kaoru asks, not wanting to say all the hateful things he’s thinking, and Kyoya smiles like when he used to right before checkmate, back when chess didn’t bore him yet.

“That’s the last difference between you and Hikaru that I’ll tell you about,” he says, the rim of the teacup caught on his lip. “I think you’ll like it.”

Kaoru hopes he will. Kyoya better make it good if it’s the end of this game or whatever it is they’re doing.

And then what, Kaoru wants to ask, like he’s a child and doesn’t understand tomorrows.

“You’re kind,” Kyoya says, and Kaoru’s thoughts are muddy, how kind, how kind, how kind.

“Hikaru’s kind,” he says, defensively. “Anyway, Haruhi said it already, that he’s that little bit nastier.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Kyoya says, half the coffee gone now, as if he’d rather gulp it down than savor it.

But _of course_ that’s not what you mean, Kaoru thinks bitterly.

“What I mean is that the things that come to your mind must often be so much worse than the nastiest thing Hikaru will think of, and hardly anyone realizes because you never say them out loud.”

Kaoru feels tired suddenly, the awareness that someone sees how bad he is heavy like wet clothes. If anyone, it had to be Kyoya, but, somehow, he half-hoped it would be the one thing Kyoya would never guess.

“What, you think if Hikaru’s thoughts were as bad as mine, he’d voice them?”

“What does it matter, when he doesn’t have them in the first place?”

They watch each other over the table, and Kaoru feels transparent, as if Kyoya could easily map his veins. He smiles, and he knows that it’s hostile and ugly, but can’t wipe it off even when he drags his thumb over his lips.

“No, I think it’s admirable, actually,” Kyoya says, and the teacup clicks as he puts it away, his voice warmed smooth. “All that terrible potential and you keep it in line so nicely.”

Kaoru breathes out too fast, like a deflating balloon, and thinks that only Kyoya would say that with such curiosity, like he’s dissecting a frog and finding something vile inside isn’t trouble but a chance.

“Are you nearly finished, then?” Kaoru says, pointing to the laptop, because he doesn’t know what else to say, fuck you, thank you, stop it, say it again.

“Tamaki insisted on making Haruhi Cleopatra, but I can’t get the costume here for tomorrow,” Kyoya says, shoulders slumping in resignation. It occurs to Kaoru how ridiculous this is, after everything they’ve ever done, a missing dress. Funny how normal kids learn that not everything is possible when they’re too small to remember the disappointment of it and yet it takes people like them years to trip on the fact.

“If you get me something similar, I’ll alter it for you.”

“How?” Kyoya asks, confused, as if he’s not himself, as if the coffee hasn’t quite hit him yet in spite of how he swallowed it down, greedy, in huge mouthfuls.

“I have a sewing machine, remember?” Kaoru laughs. “Actually, I have three.”

Kyoya watches him, and there’s something still about time, as if it was running before and has now stopped to take a look around, like the space between an inhale and an exhale.

“I don’t know your favorite flowers,” Kyoya says, and before Kaoru can feel embarrassed at the reminder, he smiles, determined. “But I will.”

Kaoru smiles back, the stretch of it almost hurting. “Told you it was a game.”

*

At night, he almost runs the sewing machine over his own fingers, the knocking of it lulling him to sleep, but he jerks awake in time and takes a few sips of his coffee, determined to finish. The desk lamp is on and he imagines someone seeing it from the outside, a pool of light, someone still up.

When he’s near finished, he does fall asleep, arms folded on the desk.

He falls asleep, and dreams of Hikaru painting roses red.

You said you preferred _Through the Looking Glass_, he complains, staring at Hikaru’s red fingers, but Hikaru continues painting and Kaoru can’t do anything, no matter how hard he wishes they could stay white.

What if they were blue, he wonders?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sooooooo, the conversations they have in this chapter are beyond ridiculous, i realize, but in my defense a) i wrote this chapter half a year ago b) i feel like kyoya and kaoru both are the kind of neurotic people who'd analyze everything to the point where their conversation is like a chess game between two people who always have the potential moves predicted and just basically know that the other also knows the obvious so then they go beyond the obvious and it sounds like a hannibal episode and it's all good and well until someone with a brain publishes an article titled 'why the hannibal characters talk like sophisiticated vampires on drugs' 
> 
> but the good news is that i have one more chapter written and after that i'll have to actually write the rest and hopefully my writing style is better than some months ago
> 
> also i will update faster, i promise, this period in my life between chapter 1 and 2 was just... weird 
> 
> anyway, hope you enjoyed and any feedback would make me incredibly happy <3


	3. Chapter 3

‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall:

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall

All the King’s horses and all the King’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty in his place again’

~~Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass & What Alice Found There

Once, back when Tamaki still lied to himself about his feelings, back when even Hikaru did, Kaoru smiled at Kyoya even though Kyoya was busy with papers and wouldn’t see it.

“Senpai,” he said, lazy, mocking, no respect, and let his leg dangle out the window – one tilt of his hip and he’d fall against the ground like the start of an applause. “Do you know how things end?”

Kyoya had a pencil tucked behind his ear, and Kaoru remembers thinking that were someone other than the two of them in the room, the pencil would be on the coffee table instead, lined up neatly with its edge. He wondered, at that time, if it was trust or disregard – if Kaoru was deserving of honesty like no one else, or undeserving of pretenses, no more important than a boring tapestry. He thought, I’m reading a story I’m not in, and not for the first time.

“Well, that depends on whatever it is that’s ending,” Kyoya said without looking up, and Kaoru wondered if there was lead smeared on his skin where the tip of the pencil wasn’t bothering him enough to adjust it.

“No,” Kaoru said, shaking his head, almost losing balance, and Kyoya looked up sharply, as if he knew, as if, without watching, he still managed to watch, somehow. “There’s only one answer, and you have to guess.”

Kyoya didn’t answer then, no matter how much Kaoru nagged him, no matter how many of Kyoya’s notes he crumpled or made into paper cranes, but weeks later, when Hikaru already knew he loved Haruhi and already knew that he would try his chances, Kyoya caught Kaoru by the strap of his bag, a gentle tug that wouldn’t stop him if Kaoru decided to walk on.

“Kaoru,” he said, standing behind him and smelling of something that Kaoru knew as familiar. “Do you know how things end?”

In front of him, Haruhi was walking away, Hikaru following, and no one realized—

It’s because I walk quietly, Kaoru thought to himself, stupid, oh so stupid, and played a game with himself, tearing petals of a flower in his mind – will he turn around and notice me? – he will, he won’t, he will, he won’t.

With every step Hikaru took, he wanted to give up, some exhaustion begging his eyes to close before he could cry, but he wouldn’t stop because roses had many petals after all.

“Tell me,” he croaked, something awkward, caught between a whine and a whisper. In his head, there were still dozens of petals left, but Hikaru had already rounded the corner, rounded the corner, rounded the corner, and Kaoru kept seeing it, like it would never end. But it would, as all things do.

Behind him, he imagined Kyoya smiling – sad or maybe perverse, because wasn’t everything ending for him, too?

“Things end,” he said, voice oh-so-soft, the name of what he smelled of on the tip of Kaoru’s tongue, “because they change.”

*

They brush their teeth, and Kaoru still has him, somehow, Hikaru’s elbow in his side, toothpaste foaming in the corner of his mouth, and they’re together both here and on the other side of the mirror.

And yet Kaoru wonders if, when Hikaru brushes his teeth alone, his reflection is some wonderful future he’s hoping to sneak into or if it’s Kaoru, trapped on the other side, the exhausting burden of it all. If he avoids looking in the mirror or stares and stares and stares.

Sometimes, they still synchronize their breathing, as if they share a pair of lungs, but already Hikaru doesn’t want to sew and already Kaoru’s decided he doesn’t want to do anything else.

We’ve already changed, he thinks, specks of toothpaste on the mirror, so why does it feel like we’re yet to end?

*

“It’s November,” Kaoru says, as if Kyoya doesn’t know, and breathes warmth into his hands.

Kyoya watches him, and doesn’t say anything. It’s one of those days, and so, Kaoru doesn’t say anything after that, either.

He thinks, it’s November, and your birthday is in November.

Kyoya, he almost asks, have I ever remembered it before? Kyoya, he almost says, imagining his fingers tugging on Kyoya’s sleeve. Let’s make it a game!

*

The first mistake Kaoru makes is thinking that he’s reading a story instead of being inside it.

_perhaps because you haven’t even begun yet_

“We’re loose ends,” he tells Kyoya, or maybe only thinks it. “We’re the side stories that never get tied up because there are already too many pages,” he thinks, or maybe only says it.

We will all go our ways, he muses, hands in pockets for warmth, and thinks that at least nothing will change before that. He laughs, because if he’s only a side story, then as soon as they all split, surely he’ll disappear.

“Decide already,” Kyoya tells him in his dreams, even though Kaoru doesn’t want him there, making coffee and drinking it all himself. “Either you’re a side story, or reading it. You can’t have both.”

“Why can’t I?” Kaoru says, wronged, childish, all that spoiled whining that he’s so good at. “I’m only a half, so why can’t I have both to make up for it?”

Kyoya looks at him, cup empty and a coffee ring inside it, and Kaoru looks for gaps where he could wedge his fingernails, because Kyoya must be a set of nesting dolls, too.

If you guess how many there are, I’ll tell you your favorite flower, Kyoya said once, in a different dream, and Kaoru thought, I don’t know such big numbers.

“What if there’s a story about you out there, and we’re all side plots, all of us but you?” Kyoya says, and he’s wearing a coat, because it’s already November, but he hunches his shoulders, cold anyway.

Kaoru laughs and laughs and laughs, like he’s crazy, like he’ll never stop, and because it’s a dream, he tells Kyoya why through all that laughter.

“No way! No way, senpai! There’s no story of mine where you’re just a side plot!”

When he wakes, he only remembers the dream in halves, thank God.

*

Autumn looks like a crime, everything red-gold, and it makes Kaoru think of fabrics and sketch on cake napkins when Kyoya’s not looking. I’ll make you a dress, he promises Haruhi, and ignores how she mumbles that she doesn’t want one. He wants to knit leaves together and have them not tear.

“So, like curtains?” Hikaru says, and Kaoru pokes his tongue out at him. One afternoon, in search of some niche textbook Haruhi needs, Tamaki falls into heaps of leaves, and Kaoru tries to remember the colors because in a few days, he knows, the rust and gold will turn to grey, and they’ll slip on leaves instead of having them rustle under their shoes like tissue paper. He presses some of them between book pages, but they always lose some of their color anyway. Kaoru stares at them, helpless, and is scared to check on that kadupul flower he kept days before.

He keeps sketching dresses, and Kyoya catches him once, over Kaoru’s shoulder, before Kaoru can smell him, which— creepy as it is—

“Better hurry up,” Kyoya says, looking out the window. “Everything’s losing color already.”

Things end because they—

Kaoru tilts his head back, so that he can stare at Kyoya.

“You’re such a pessimist, Kyoya.”

“I like to think I’m a realist,” Kyoya says, and Kaoru smiles, because he thinks that in their world, the two are really the same thing.

*

Someone always kidnaps Haruhi, and so, Kaoru forgets to expect someone to kidnap him.

In the trunk of somebody’s car, the smell inside unpleasant, all stale crackers and dust, he laughs through the cloth shoved in his mouth and tied behind his head. Why would anyone kidnap him, anyway? So that his new line of vests doesn’t ever make it to some almost-important fashion show?

There is no new line of vests, he tries to mumble through the spit-wet fabric. All he’s been making recently is mismatched things that are meant to be warm and to accommodate the flex of skin, but won’t fit his mother’s mannequins, won’t make journalists blister the tips of their fingers on the shutter button.

Well, there’s money, of course, but of all of them, he and Hikaru are hardly the richest.

He misses him, briefly, wondering what it’d be like were Hikaru here, their wrists bound together and their bodies curled together, yin and yang. Almost bearable, maybe, but in the end, he’s happy Hikaru gets to be somewhere else, hands free and only candy in his mouth.

Let’s go out, Tamaki said, and they all went, coats and laughter and Kaoru got so used to trailing behind and watching – _I’m not part of the story, I’m simply reading it_ – that it must have been easy to gag him and shove a foot to the back of his knees until he crumpled into strange arms.

He remembers trying to bite, and how he only managed to bite through his lip. He can taste it now, like dirty money, like old metal, and wonders how long it will take the rest to realize he’s gone.

Three minutes, he thinks, merciless. Four.

Ten?

Things end because they change, and everything ends when the car jostles so suddenly that Kaoru’s forehead hits something, hard, and when through the pulsing at his temple, he imagines Kyoya’s fingers flying, phone in hand.

Everything ends, because now that he has nothing but wishful thinking, he wants Kyoya to be the one to realize first.

Sharp eyes behind a pair of glasses, hands in pockets, and Kaoru gone.

This time when Kaoru laughs it’s so loud that he can hear himself, even through the cloth, even through the blood.

*

When he comes to – because he drifted off at some point, head throbbing – it’s to the screech of the trunk door, Hikaru’s arms up and a frown on his face.

“Jesus,” he says, and doesn’t throw himself on Kaoru, maybe because he looks like he’ll never move, not forward, not backwards, not sideways. “I’ll kill them all, I’ll fucking rip their guts out through their throats—”

There’s a hand on his shoulder, Tamaki staring at Kaoru like he’s about to cry. Kaoru can’t spit out blood, so he swallows, and his throat barely takes it, constricting around it, sticky and dry, raw in the aftermath of hysteria.

“It’s all taken care of,” Kyoya says somewhere, and Kaoru tries to crane his neck, but it hurts too much. “No need for violence.”

“I _want_ to be violent!” Hikaru yells, and lets go of the door to punch the car. It jostles and Kaoru winces. “I _deserve_ to be violent!”

“Wait until he’s out of it before you kick the thing to pieces, would you?” Kyoya says, and Kaoru wonders if Hikaru will snap out of it and hug him, now.

“Fuck!” Hikaru yells instead, and kicks a streetlamp. Tamaki reaches inside the trunk, hands trembling, and tries to untie the cloth still stuffed in Kaoru’s mouth, but he can’t do it, fingers knocking into Kaoru’s nape like some sweet, sad song. Kaoru decides that when Tamaki finally gets the thing off, he’ll ask him to play him a scherzo, not Chopin, something light, but in the end, Kyoya leans in and bats Tamaki’s hands away. His own, when he undoes the knot, are steady, and Kaoru has his eyes closed, but he knows it’s Kyoya, because there’s that smell again.

It’s not coffee, and it’s not cologne. It’s not mint, and it’s not leather. It’s not shampoo, and it’s not wool—

He spits the cloth out, and Tamaki gasps at the bit of blood. Kyoya only stares, impassive, and then folds it stain-inwards and pockets it, a dirty evidence. All he needs to make it more impersonal is a plastic bag he could zip it in.

“What have those fuckers done—” Hikaru starts yelling, and Kaoru grins, even though it hurts, the split in his lip stretching.

“I bit them,” he says, or rather croaks, throat dry.

“Did you really?” Hikaru says, rage forgotten for a moment.

“Well, no,” Kaoru admits, and laughs softly. “I tried to, but only bit myself.”

Kyoya brushes his fingers through Kaoru’s hair, and Kaoru freezes and freezes and freezes and is about to melt but a moment later the soft scrape of fingernails is gone and Kyoya’s palm is open in front of his face, a candy wrapper caught between the inside of it and his thumb.

Right, Kaoru thinks, and closes his eyes against the disappointment of it. Of course.

Mori and Hani come forward, Hani sniffling, and help him get out of the trunk. He can’t get his footing for a moment, and collapses to the ground. He feels pathetic, sitting there cross-legged, but no one says anything and Haruhi sits down next to him, holding onto his sleeve like she’s scared someone will try to drag him away again if she so much as looks away.

This time, when Hikaru kicks the streetlamp, he yells in pain.

“What did they want, anyway?” Kaoru asks, and looks up, wishing for rain. He feels sticky, and disgusting, and lopsided.

“What they always want,” Kyoya says, and if it’s all taken care of, why is he still tapping on his phone, jaw locked in some quiet determination? “Money, more money.”

“Well, it sure was a—” Kaoru starts, and looks for a word. He’s about to say, ride, but he throws up all over himself before he can get the word out. Kyoya stops typing and starts making phone calls, instead.

*

Later, when the sun is half-melted into the horizon, they’re all crammed at Haruhi’s, Kaoru’s hair wet from the shower, and a blanket wrapped around his shoulders There’s no better place for this – everywhere else, there would be questions, and actions, clogs working.

At the kitchen counter, Haruhi is cooking something, Tamaki watching over her shoulder and offering to cut more vegetables, two plasters already on his fingers, and Hikaru glances at them sometimes, even though Kyoya doesn’t, not once.

“Are you sure you don’t want tea, Kaoru?” Haruhi calls over her shoulder, and Kyoya pushes his fingers into his forehead, charge low when Kaoru takes a peek at his phone. Sometimes, his hand trembles, and Kaoru tells himself it’s fatigue and not – well, Kyoya’s hands were steady when it mattered, and there’s no use in wishful thinking.

Kaoru still doesn’t feel comfortable with just how wishful it is.

“I’m alright, thank you,” he says, and wraps the blanket tighter around himself. He wants to tell her that it’s not a big deal, but he doesn’t trust his voice not to crack. Once, someone kidnapped him and Hikaru, and drove them halfway across the country before they got caught, but then, at the time, they were together, and Kaoru wasn’t a lonely half yet, hadn’t started re-growing his missing parts yet, hadn’t even realized anything was missing in the first place.

“How about coffee, then?” Kyoya says, and Kaoru bites his lip until the not-yet scabbed split starts hurting anew.

“Coffee,” Kaoru echoes, because he’s been raised to indulge himself even when he should know better. “Yes.”

“Oh, sure,” Haruhi says, but Kaoru doesn’t get the chance to feel disappointed, because Kyoya’s getting up, something almost, almost hasty about it, his coat falling off his lap and to the couch.

“I’ll make it, if that’s alright,” he says, more formal than he usually is with them, a polite apology in the tone of his voice itself. “Kaoru is very picky about how he likes it, see.”

Kaoru scowls, and pretends he doesn’t see when Hikaru arches his eyebrow.

At the counter, Kyoya takes the tin of instant coffee from a dumbfounded Haruhi, and seems to relax even though everyone in the room watches him in puzzlement. He rolls up the cuffs of his shirtsleeves, once, so that his wrists are exposed, and doesn’t exactly hunch his shoulders, but lets them collapse into something a bit less rigid than a minute before.

Kaoru bites the inside of his cheek in a hopeless attempt at forcing his blood to retreat from his face, hoping nobody will notice. He feels awkward in a sleepy way, like in a moment, he’ll be too exhausted to pretend to be his normal self, and will collapse into this pathetic thing he’s learned about himself, everything be damned.

Kyoya hands him the mug without looking at Kaoru, on his way back to the tatami, like an afterthought, and Kaoru holds himself together by inches, sucking his own blood out of the cut.

“Kyoya,” Tamaki starts, inspired, about to say something like, how wonderful of you, how touching, how this and that, and Kaoru’s five years old, because he interrupts.

“You spoil me,” he says, voice teasing, and stretches his legs under the table, his feet bumping into Kyoya’s knee. He expects Kyoya to ignore him, and he’s not ready for the smirk – so rare, these days.

“Just the once,” Kyoya says, quiet, but not quiet enough for someone to miss it, and Kaoru smiles, because what a lie. In his own way, Kyoya spoils him all the time.

“What are you even doing, anyway?” Hikaru asks from where he’s leaning on the doorframe, as if too restless to sit, and points to Kyoya’s phone.

“Just some cleaning up,” Kyoya says with a lazy wave of a hand, and Hikaru’s expression softens into something that maybe wouldn’t cut if you tripped and fell on it.

They eat ramen, and Kaoru forces himself to swallow it, not to sate hunger but for the spill of warmth in his stomach. Outside, the sun’s gone elsewhere already, and the night is like the inside of something, a fist curled around them too tight to see anything beyond it. He remembers what the trunk of that car smelled like, and tries to remember Kyoya instead, leaning over him and some other scent, familiar, familiar—

“Are you cold, Kaoru?” Haruhi asks, a wrinkle of worry between her eyebrows, and Kaoru flexes his wrists to check that they’re untied. “You’re shaking.”

Kaoru waves her off and adjusts the blanket around his shoulders, telling himself that when Kyoya’s fingers falter, it’s about something else, nothing to do with him, nothing at all.

Later, when they’re back home, Hikaru curls himself around him like he’s a growth, something cancerous melted into Kaoru’s skin, only so much lovelier.

“I thought—” he starts, choked up. “Kaoru.”

“It’s alright,” Kaoru says, and brushes Hikaru’s fringe off his forehead in a soothing gesture. “I’m here.”

One of Hikaru’s legs is between Kaoru’s own, and the other flung across his hip, Hikaru’s breath at his neck and his arms locked around him like there’s a knot somewhere, and Kaoru breathes through it. What he was scared of, back in that car, wasn’t being taken far away or getting hurt, but minutes passing somewhere else and no one knowing him gone. Scarier yet, how, when he started blinking open, when the trunk door titled up, when he could hear familiar voices, he wasn’t sure who he hoped to see first, looking down at him.

“I didn’t want it,” he whines into Hikaru’s hair, and Hikaru sobs and says I know, I know, I know, because he thinks they mean the same thing.

*

When they were twelve – or was it thirteen? – their copy of _Through the Looking Glass & What Alice Found There_ was already falling apart, covers loose, pages dog-eared, but Hikaru didn’t want a new one. When they were twelve – or was it thirteen? – they’d both read the book three, four, five times, but Hikaru would still tell Kaoru all about it, as if Kaoru didn’t know.

It’s a whole different world on the other side, he’d say, hands flying. Full of wonders and weird people and not-people who recite poetry and say stupid things, full of adventures and –

But Humpty-Dumpty, Kaoru interrupted once.

What about him?, Hikaru asked, impatient, and Kaoru didn’t know what to say.

Humpty-Dumpty, what if he fell?

What if he falls?

What if all those wonders on the other side are not so wonderful?

What if it’s better to not walk through the mirror?

What if it’s better to not even look in it?

What if it’s better to not know it’s there?

When something changes, doesn’t it end?

*

The story is about him, and Kyoya’s in it, and Kaoru doesn’t like it, not one bit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, this is the last chapter that I wrote in September which means that from the next chapter onwards the writing should technically get better. I hope. I'll try? Hope you enjoyed anyway and thank you for reading and all the kudos/comments <333


	4. Chapter 4

“I mean,” she said, “that one can’t help growing older.”

“One can’t, perhaps,” said Humpty Dumpty, “but two can.”

~Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass & What Alice Found There

Shyness doesn’t suit him, and Kaoru wouldn’t know how to wear it anyway, so he’s all the more loud, all the more Hitachiin, shame wrapped inside its lack like a perfect sleight of hand in a game of cards.

“Why, thank you,” he laughs when Kyoya offers him a lilac macaroni, and he kisses him on the cheek with a loud smack, all for show, until the students they have over squeal and cover their mouths with their gloved hands, all shock, eyelashes batting as they glance over at Hikaru, only Hikaru’s too busy staring at Haruhi to notice. It’s faerie this time, whatever that means, and Kaoru has ice-blue petals in his hair, gold on his eyelids, pink on his cheeks. The lilac lip gloss stains Kyoya’s cheek like a smear of that macaroni, and Kaoru doesn’t look at it for the rest of the afternoon, not once.

When the shyness does creep out, it’s whenever the two of them are left alone together, and so Kaoru makes sure that they’re never left alone together at all. He doesn’t ask Kyoya for coffee, and doesn’t hang around long enough to have him offer to make it for him. He doesn’t make up games, and he doesn’t tease, and he’s never the last to leave the room, any room. There’s still a forever of leaves outside, whispering stories under his feet as he walks home to avoid Hikaru asking him what’s wrong, and sometimes when he crushes them in his hands and brings the ruin of them to his nose, he almost thinks that’s it, that smell—

Only if it is, then what will he do once autumn ends?

And then Kyoya says his name, and Kaoru doesn’t even turn around at first, assumes he must have imagined it. He only glances over his shoulder when Kyoya says it again, an edge to it like on its way out of his mouth, Kaoru’s name drags over his teeth. Kaoru can almost feel it on his skin, like an unexpected irritation, like a vibration after a bite. The crumpled leaves fall through his fingers, breaking to nothing as easily as flakes of ash would, and it reminds Kaoru of how he set fire to one of Hikaru’s copies of _Through the Looking Glass & What Alice Found There_ once, how fast the first page thinned to nothing and how good arson felt itching at his fingers.

Kyoya’s eyelids are painted forest-green still, and it’s scary how much it suits him, as if he’d just woken up after centuries of sleep, moss-grown and too-old for his teenage self.

“Kaoru,” he repeats again, unnecessarily, such a small thing. “Your bag,” he says, slightly out of breath, a smaller thing yet. He holds it up, eyebrows raised, and Kaoru fists the last leaf crumbs in frustration at himself. He thinks that once, Kyoya wouldn’t rush after him, would have the bag delivered to Kaoru’s house instead, and he smiles bitterly.

“Oh, yes,” he says, so quiet he’s not sure if Kyoya will even catch it from where he’s standing. “I’m so forgetful, aren’t I?”

He tries to keep the venom from his voice, because for all Kyoya’s intelligence, Kaoru doesn’t think he’ll catch that it’s directed at himself.

“Especially recently, yes,” Kyoya admits, and Kaoru smiles politely and crosses the few feet between them, holding his hand out. Kyoya stares at it for a moment, and then, wonder of wonders, holds the bag up and out of Kaoru’s reach – probably the most childish act he’s allowed himself since he stopped wearing diapers. “You seem to be in an awful hurry.”

“Well, that’s because I _am_,” Kaoru snaps. “So why not let me hurry along to wherever it is I’m hurrying?”

Oh, if only Hikaru could hear him—

“Is there any particular reason why you’re avoiding me?” Kyoya asks, and his eyes have too much smart in them to fit human in there too.

“But I’m not,” Kaoru insists, stuffing his hands in his pockets to keep himself from reaching for the bag. “I’m _not_.”

“Is it because of those kidnappers?” Kyoya says, unexpectedly, and Kaoru’s blank expression must be telling, because he frowns and immediately backtracks. “Never mind that. I apologize,” he says, voice smoother than all the silk the two of them have worn between them, and he hands Kaoru the bag, smile all polite. It’s the tabloid one, perfectly pleasant if you don’t know him, warm even, and chilling to the bone if you do.

“What about the kidnappers?” Kaoru asks, even though he knows it’s a lost cause, like jerking at a handle of a locked door.

“Get some rest when you get home,” Kyoya says, the way a doctor might, like he’s signing a paper instead of talking to a— a friend. “You have a test tomorrow, don’t you?”

All that care for every host club member’s perfect average.

“Sure, senpai,” Kaoru says, and drags his bag home. It feels twice as heavy as it did in the morning, and so do his bones.

*

Once, when they were smaller, they couldn’t find any maid to make them tea and so they boiled the water themselves, searching all over for the tins full of tea leaves.

‘Sugar, too,’ Hikaru said, and tried to reach a sugar bowl kept in one of the kitchen cupboards. He almost had it, his fingertips dragging over the porcelain – printed with a William Morris pattern that their mother had made on request and shipped from Europe for more money than one would pay for most Tokyo apartments. He almost had it, but, in the end, instead of getting hold of the bowl, he accidentally knocked it off the shelf. As it fell, there was no slow-motion to it, just a flash and then sugar and porcelain shards everywhere. Kaoru just stared, and tried to think of a way to make it better, wishing porcelain could be stitched back together like a piece of cloth, and he was already so good at stitching, but Hikaru didn’t waste time and started collecting the pieces, all shaky fingers. He yelped as one cut his pinkie, and Kaoru yelped, too, said don’t, don’t, don’t.

He kneeled next to Hikaru and watched the blood well up, Wonderland-red, only nothing wonderful about it. He didn’t think, just acted, and reached for that same shard of porcelain stained red and slashed his own pinkie open. Hikaru watched him do it, and it was one of those moments when they’d forget which one of them was older, which one of them was Hikaru, and which one of them was Kaoru. The biggest irony of that game they kept playing with others – how, sometimes, even they themselves couldn’t get it right.

‘Careful,’ Kaoru said, and put his finger in his mouth to suck the blood off. ‘Careful.’

‘What now?’ Hikaru asked, all quick breath, and oh, if they could just paint the bowl whole the way card soldiers were painting roses red in that stupid, _stupid_ book—

Back then, Kaoru liked to blame everything on Alice.

Later, they did admit to their mother that Hikaru had been the one to break the bowl, but they wouldn’t admit which one of them was Hikaru no matter what. Fine, so be it, she said, and told them that they would both be punished, waiting for them to frown. They did, too, but once she turned her back on them, they smiled instead, because they didn’t mind, because it was all going exactly how they’d wanted it to go. It didn’t matter, not eating cake for a month and helping the gardener clean the pond on the grounds of fallen leaves and water striders, as long as they’d be doing it together, and they would.

Kaoru doesn’t think that their mother’s never thought of punishing them by separation, just that for all the tough love, she didn’t quite have the heart to.

They would eat off one plate, they would share a pillow, they would use the same bathwater, and years later, Kaoru would almost, almost love Haruhi, too. He would almost, almost love her, only it wouldn’t work in the end, only he’d end up locking himself in school bathrooms, fisting his hair and trying so hard to like her the way he should, and then trying so hard to unlike her, not knowing which was better for them, not knowing which Hikaru would rather he felt.

He’s not sure Hikaru would ever love someone Kaoru started loving first, and so he tries not to love anyone unless Hikaru already loves them, but, in the end, that doesn’t quite work either.

‘Careful,’ he’d said that day, and now when Hikaru breaks something, he never starts picking the pieces up, and there’s no scar on his finger, no trace of how he used to, once.

*

‘Do you think you’d be doing this if you hadn’t been born into this family?’ Hikaru asks him around the time the leaves falling off the trees start folding upon themselves, too dry to retain their shape. He’s leaning on the doorway to the attic room where they keep all their sewing machines, and Kaoru is holding fabrics up to the light, comparing the colors.

‘I don’t see what’s the use in wondering that,’ he says, careful. ‘Since I _was_ born into this family, and all.’

‘Yes, but—’ Hikaru starts, already impatient, already like a scare of sparks. ‘But what if you hadn’t been?’

‘Well, we’ll never know, will we?’ Kaoru says, putting the fabrics away. ‘I get what you’re trying to say, but I think wondering that is reserved for people who are not happy about whatever it is they were born into.’

‘You sound so—’ he doesn’t have to finish for Kaoru to hear it, how he sounds _cold_. ‘Oh, and how do you know this really makes you happy?’

‘How do you know it makes you unhappy?’ Kaoru says in lieu of an answer. He smiles, just a quirk of his lips, and Hikaru reluctantly smiles back. Kaoru almost tells him that he loves the feel of wool under his palm, loves the prick of a needle and how the skin of his fingertips flakes if he stays up all night sewing, loves those mannequins their mother keeps all over the house. They used to have so much fun when they were younger, playing the kind of hide-and-seek where you had to hide all the mannequins and then yourself, the kind of hide-and-seek that their mother would yell at them for and join herself, searching for them in trunks and threatening them with no toys on their birthday. So much fun, poking the mannequins in the eyes to check if they were alive, tickling them, detaching their arms and swapping them for legs. Once, Kaoru even climbed a stool and kissed one, dry-lips and eyes wide open, his first if you counted it.

‘I find it boring, I guess,’ Hikaru says, and Kaoru wonders if he should try and find it boring, too, to bring them that bit closer to each other, to keep the distance from widening like a yawning mouth.

Only he loves sewing too much, he really does.

‘What isn’t boring, then?’ he says, smiling at Hikaru like it’s the beginning of a race.

‘Blowing things up isn’t,’ Hikaru says after a moment’s thought. ‘Only I’m not quite sure how to make a career out of it just yet.’

Kaoru laughs, and doesn’t think of what it is he’s choosing the fabric for so carefully.

*

One afternoon, Tamaki starts sweeping the fallen rose petals, as if he’s forgotten the cleaners, forgotten all his engagements, forgotten that it’s too heartbreaking a thing for him to do.

‘Why don’t you walk Haruhi home, instead?’ Kaoru says, watching him with boredom.

‘She has signed up for something extra-curricular, apparently,’ Tamaki says, wiping sweat off his forehead as if sweeping is too exhausting to bear. ‘And it’s you that should be walked home, anyway, after last time.’

Kaoru snorts. ‘I’m a big boy, Tono.’

‘Well, small enough to fit in the trunk of a Toyota, anyhow,’ Tamaki says, unusually grim. ‘But yes, I suppose I must be exaggerating. You’re as safe as one can be, now, I’d say.’

‘What do you mean?’ Kaoru asks innocently, already smelling a secret.

‘Kyoya took care of everything, don’t you know?’ Tamaki says, and even raises his eyebrows, as if it should be obvious.

‘What does ‘everything’ entail, though?’ Kaoru asks, leaning forward in his chair, no longer pretending to be bored.

‘Well, I don’t know the details, but I’m pretty sure that everyone from gang members to local temple employees has been warned off you. A lot of bribing and a lot of threatening, I hear. A lot of not-sleeping, too, and I should know, since I caught Kyoya, bless him, applying foundation for those bruises under his eyes, _foundation_, can you imagine—’ he must notice Kaoru’s expression just then, because he grows quiet, and smiles awkwardly. ‘Oh, don’t go feeling guilty about it, Kaoru, really, that’s just what Kyoya _does_. I’m sure you know that by now, anyway, don’t you?’

Kaoru opens his mouth, but nothing comes out, like he’s a fish in a tank, stupid circles, no sound.

‘And didn’t they have some extra surveillance installed at your place this week? Yes? Well, there you go, that was Kyoya, too, what did you think?’

‘I don’t even know what to say,’ Kaoru manages to stammer out. 

‘What’s there to say?’ Tamaki says, blinking at him with curiosity. ‘That’s what families are for, no?’

At that, Kaoru smiles wryly.

‘I thought you’ve stopped pretending we’re a family.’

Tamaki smiles, too, a salesman smile.

‘I’ve only accepted our family for what it is, not forgotten it altogether,’ he says, and sweeps the petals into the corner of the room, humming something quietly, a symphony Kaoru half-remembers.

‘Alright,’ Kaoru says softly, unclenching his hands. ‘Alright, then.’

*

When Kaoru first notices it, he almost keeps himself from doing anything about it. Dozens of girls all over the club room, and there, there, that pale strip of skin where the ends of his hair almost but not quite curl, and a rip in Kyoya’s collar.

Once Kaoru spots it, he can’t stop staring at it, and, at one point, Kyoya rubs his nape as if he can feel his gaze there. He squares his shoulders, as if he’s telling himself not to be stupid, not to glance over his shoulder, and oh, Kaoru doesn’t know if he wants him to be stupid or not. It’s as Kyoya’s refilling cake slices on one of the plates that cost more than school tuition at Ouran’s that Kaoru gives up and comes up to stand behind him and examine the rip.

‘How are you?’ Kyoya asks, warmer than Kaoru’s used to him sounding, even with how he’s warmed recently anyway.

‘Collar,’ Kaoru says, less articulate than he’d like, and reaches up to thumb at it. Kyoya stays quiet, and lets him, but his skin seemed to go taut, as if he’s bracing for something. ‘It’s ripped, you know?’

Kyoya doesn’t know, doesn’t say anything, just exhales.

‘Is it, now.’

‘Really,’ Kaoru insists, reaching up to hold the fabric together with his fingers. ‘I can mend it for you.’

‘It won’t be necessary, but thank you,’ Kyoya says, and he sounds as if he’s speaking from far off, as if they’re not a breath apart.

‘Come on, it won’t take but a minute,’ Kaoru says, remembering too late that he wasn’t supposed to be left alone with Kyoya. Kyoya straightens as he agrees, as if instead of resigning himself to the idea, he’s steeling himself for something, and Kaoru wonders if it’s all his fault, if he’s been too cold. He’s nothing like Tamaki, that much is obvious, nothing like Tamaki and nothing like a kotatsu.

Two minutes later, they’re in an empty classroom, Kyoya sat on a chair and Kaoru stood behind him with a pocket sewing kit in his teeth.

‘How does one rip their collar, anyway?’ Kyoya says, which isn’t really a very Kyoya thing to say, and Kaoru laughs so that the kit almost falls out.

‘I know, I know, it doesn’t fit in with that whole impeccable thing you’ve got going on,’ he says lightly, and gets to work, needle and a thread, just that, just ripped fabric and fixing it, just a favor for a friend. How Kyoya’s tie has to be loosened, just a favor for a friend, because they’re friends, only Tamaki said _family_.

But if they’re a family, what are they supposed to be exactly? If it’s no longer daddy and mommy and the brats, does that make them cousins or brothers?

Suddenly, Kaoru remembers how once, last year, Tamaki dragged him and Hikaru to the side, lowered his voice and wagged his finger. Kyoya had lost lost one point on a math exam, he told them, a worried wrinkle between his eyebrows, and he looked so _stupid_. _He lost one point_, he said, _and he thinks I don’t know. Let’s keep it that way, alright?_ The almost-threat of it, the serious note in his voice – the first time Kaoru understood that Tamaki would grow up responsible and put-together enough to do wonders, he really would. He’d watch Kyoya later, how he’d gracefully change the subject whenever the exams came up in conversation, how he’d lower his gaze to his fingers for a quarter of a second, as if in shame, even though Tamaki himself had lost two points. Such small imperfection, and how he wouldn’t let it show but how it showed anyway, if you knew to look, and Kaoru did. He remembers Kyoya’s fingers circling a pencil, something helpless about it, and what he feels is all good, is all protective instinct, is all— all fondness.

So he couldn’t really say why he opens his mouth and says the next bit as if what he feels is anger. Kyoya’s collar caught between his fingers, he opens his mouth and fucks it all up, and maybe it’s the Hitachiin blood, because didn’t they use to poke stacks of china like it was a game, waiting for them to topple and for another maid to be fired for it?

‘So what happens if someone kidnaps Tamaki, then?’ Kaoru blurts out, and he drops the needle, but it’s okay, he won’t need it. After he says his piece, Kyoya won’t want a fixed collar anymore, not if it’ll mean spending another minute in Kaoru’s company. ‘I mean, what’s the plan? Do you blackmail the president if that happens? Do you threaten everyone with world wars? Because if I was worth going to all that trouble, I can’t imagine what your plan of action must be for _that _eventuality—’

Kyoya laughs quietly – it starts with the shake of his shoulders – and it shocks Kaoru enough to shut him up. He wonders if that’s how hate starts, a disgusting disillusionment, and who would have thought that Kyoya of all people would ever have any illusions in the first place? Kaoru remembers how Kyoya called him kind, and said that Kaoru wouldn’t voice all the cruel things that came to his mind, and he wonders if Kyoya regrets saying it now.

‘I’m cruel, hmm?’ Kaoru manages, once Kyoya stops chuckling, and he ties a knot at his collar where the thread is loose, because he expects getting asked to leave any moment now.

‘You’re something, alright, but not cruel, no, or it’s a childlike cruelty, anyway, like pressing on a wound because you don’t know better. Curiosity, rather,’ Kyoya says, and he sounds more amused than anything else.

‘Only I know better,’ Kaoru says, curling his fingers over the back of Kyoya’s chair, and he can almost _hear_ Kyoya smile.

‘Imagine having a weakness but living in a world where you’re not allowed weaknesses at all,’ Kyoya says, his back still to Kaoru, and it occurs to him that it’s such an intimate thing, that it requires trust, that Kyoya wouldn’t let just anyone near his neck like that, because isn’t that the most vulnerable a person can be, collar folded away and pale skin, just a finger’s tap away from one’s pulse? ‘So you try to pretend there’s no weakness at first, but no matter what good liar you are, you won’t be fooled. So then what you do is you put the weakness in a metal box, and you lock the box, and you drop the box in a lake, and you leave the box there, but you keep the key. And one day, you might need to retrieve that box from the bottom of the lake, and open it, and deal with that weakness you’d stored inside, but until then, there is no weakness, there is no box, what box? Out of sight, out of mind, and if a tree falls in a forest – Well, you know that one, don’t you?’

Kaoru stares at Kyoya’s nape, and he thinks that Kyoya is not smart at all. That top knob of his spine, and no smart person would sit there and say all that in a measured voice, no armor on.

‘So you don’t have a plan of action, then?’

Wonders never cease – Kyoya laughs again.

‘I do, too, but admitting it would mean admitting that I have a weakness, and that won’t do, will it?’

‘But you’ve just – you’ve just admitted it, though!’

‘Admitted what?’ Kyoya asks and looks at Kaoru for the first time, tipping his head back until his hair almost slides off his forehead. He smiles the way Kaoru and Hikaru always smile, all cheeky, and Kaoru suddenly longs to be back in that tight trunk, a cloth shoved in his mouth and everything still so much more simple.

‘So I have the spare key for your box now, then, don’t I?’ Kaoru says, and Kyoya relaxes his shoulders and goes back to staring straight ahead.

‘Well, I’d appreciate it if, like me, you pretended there’s no box if it’s not necessary to acknowledge it.’

‘Yeah, sure, but Kyoya, what happens if someone fishes out that box of yours and forces it open, no key needed? What then?’

‘They won’t,’ Kyoya says. ‘I won’t let it happen.’

‘Doesn’t not letting it happen require you at least acknowledging the box, though?’

‘The conversations I have with you are ever so stimulating, Kaoru,’ Kyoya says, almost fond, and Kaoru takes that for permission to undo that hasty knot and finish fixing the collar. The quiet as he works is comfortable, like falling asleep, and he thinks it’s high time he talked to Hikaru.

*

‘Is this about how you’ve been all weird recently?’ Hikaru demands, letting himself get dragged to their bedroom after dinner. ‘Because let me tell you, you’ve been _weird_, and I mean properly—’

‘Hikaru,’ Kaoru says, locking the door behind them once they’re inside. ‘I have been, yes. Weird, that is.’

Hikaru squares his shoulders, as if steeling himself, and he’s so very himself, a cowlick out of place, a wrinkled sleeve, a tug to his smile as if someone stapled the corner of his mouth against his wishes, and he’s the only weakness Kaoru’s ever been allowed, and he can’t have any more weaknesses, but he does, now.

‘You know what’s supposed to happen after we finish our education, don’t you?’ Kaoru says. ‘You’ve known for a while, and so have I.’

He doesn’t have to elaborate on it: how they grew up in one house and how they still share a bed, but how they’re expected to get married and only visit each other on weekends, anyway. They might not be as close as they used to, but there are still things Kaoru doesn’t have to explain for them to be understood anyhow.

‘We’re still in school, though, aren’t we?’ Hikaru says, something apologetic about it, because sometimes the only way to soften the reality of things inevitable is by making it seem like they’re still far off, like there’s still all that _time_, but what time when Hikaru’s gone and fallen in love and Kaoru’s gone and – something.

‘Something’s changed, and I’ve realized that it has, and I don’t know what to do about it or if I should do anything about it at all, but I’ll let you know once I decide,’ Kaoru says, and Hikaru might not understand that particular bit, not fully, but he smiles like he does, anyway, half-pride, half-regret. ‘But you know how we’re supposed to go our separate ways and grow up and change the world and pay our bills and act like we’re not Siamese twins? I just think— I just wanted to say— I just— I know that we will do all that, alright? I know that it will eventually happen. But I also know that if anyone could pull off staying kids forever, it’s us. So once I’m all grown up? Once that happens, I want to remember that even though we didn’t get to keep what we have now, we _could have._’

Hikaru stares at him for a moment, the room quiet around them like a lung before a breath, and then he walks up to Kaoru and kisses him on the forehead. Just a dry press of lips to skin, but Kaoru will remember it always, and even if one day he has to lock it up in a box and hide the box somewhere, he will never lose the key.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this story is so dramatic i swear 
> 
> please note how i added the underage drinking tag

I wonder if snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently?

~Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass & What Alice Found There

Kaoru falls asleep on top of half-ready woollen clothes most of the time, and always wakes up to a blanket flung over his shoulders and his thermos refilled with tea. Sometimes, Hikaru will leave a mean note, too, something about the bags under his eyes, or about never hanging out with him anymore, post-its stuck to the sewing machine or the desk lamp, and, on one memorable occasion, to the back of his jeans and all over his face.

They have so much homework and studying that he’s taken to recording the teachers and listening to the lessons while sewing. He gets away with missing meals sometimes, too, his mother smiling with exasperation but with pride, too.

I used to be just like this, she says over dessert, only Kaoru wouldn’t know, he’s never there for dessert. Hikaru tells him later, smuggling him cake in napkins, frosting on his fingers and butter stains on his shirt.

“What do you need all these fancy sweaters for, anyway?” he asks Kaoru once, riffling through the designs in Kaoru’s notebook.

“I can’t decide on one.”

“What do you need _a_ fancy sweater for, then? And we’re talking royalty-fancy, too,” Hikaru says, rubbing the fabric of one of the failed prototypes between his fingers.

They get Kyoya a jack-in-the-box toy for his birthday – he doesn’t even blink when the lid pops off – and cufflinks, Kaoru’s fingertips bruised and for what? Tamaki plays the piano for Kyoya, something from The Nutcracker, and Kaoru’s supposed to know the piece, knows it, even, would remember the name if someone asked him, but no one asks, so he just listens and doesn’t melt.

“So you like Tchaikovsky, then?” he asks, standing next to Kyoya, rolling up his sleeves in frustration, just to do something. By now, his lips are bitten to minced meat. “I took you for more of a Chopin kind of guy.”

“I am a Chopin kind of guy,” Kyoya admits, tilting his head towards Kaoru. He looks apologetic for some reason, and Kaoru wonders if Chopin would remind Kyoya of those boxes he insists he doesn’t know anything about, what boxes?

By the time Tamaki’s done playing, Kyoya looks like he’d be crying if he were someone else, and later, after everyone’s gone, Kaoru touches the piano keys and doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t smash it to bits.

“It would be better if everything stayed as it is,” he says to Hikaru’s shadow a second before his brother walks into the room and leans on the doorway.

“But it can’t, can it?” Hikaru says, and he went on a date the week before, too much cologne and an hour wasted on combing his hair, only to end up mussing it up right before leaving the house. Kaoru felt almost happy for him, and like it was almost okay. He spied on the two of them only once, by walking past the restaurant they were in and craning his neck to glance inside. The girl had a summer smile, and was wearing a dress their mother would hate, but at least it was a dress. “Some party, huh? I think Kyoya-senpai even smiled, once.”

He did, the opening notes of that Tchaikovsky piece, his cake untouched, cufflinks put aside.

“To think he’s only a year older than us, and his father is already matchmaking. I hope he’ll let Kyoya get through university, at least, before marrying him off to that – what’s her name, again?”

Kaoru moves his hands away, quicker then if the piano burnt him. Touching it suddenly feels like a sin.

“_Whose_ name?”

“That girl from that very important family that deals with something even more important, blah, blah, blah? The one he’s supposed to have dinner with next weekend? Hasn’t he mentioned it to you? I mean, you’re all buddy-buddy now, so you’d think he’d tell you, since even _I _know—”

It hits Kaoru harder than something that obvious ever should: that it’s one thing, Kyoya not wanting him, and quite another Kyoya not able to have him even if he did. He thinks of Tamaki, French words snuck into sentences, butter-soft-smile, grand gestures, and no wonder Kyoya pretends that box of his away when he’s probably booked solid for the next three years, business transactions masquerading as dates, dates masquerading as showing someone around the city, and Kaoru can see himself so clearly, a while from now, getting Kyoya’s measurements for his wedding suit and drinking himself unconscious right after.

“He likes marzipan,” Kaoru says, laughing quietly.

“Excuse me?”

No twin telepathy when you need it, and Kaoru laughs louder, almost closes the piano but can’t quite bring himself to do so.

Kyoya likes marzipan because he must have been the kind of kid who’d obediently eat it at parties instead of whining for proper chocolate until he’d get his way. Kaoru imagines him like that, six-years-old and already attorney-serious, nibbling on expensive sweets, refusing to frown, and no wonder he likes marzipan now, after years and years of that.

If there’s anything Kaoru knows, it’s this: He and Hikaru always yelled for cheap candy so loud that they’d get it in the end, no exception, and when they’re ready to marry, their parents won’t have a say in who they’ll get married to. They’ll be able to choose all by themselves, as long as it’s someone who hasn’t been forced into liking marzipan either.

*

Tamaki holds Haruhi’s hand like it’s her heart instead, like he won’t grip it too hard for fear of crushing it, and Kyoya doesn’t look their way once, but Kaoru knows he’s watching them, anyway. He wonders if it hurts like an inconvenience, a sharp pain like the prick of a needle, and he hopes it’s no worse than that, because one can easily survive a needle, Kaoru knows that much.

“What if you’re holding the box while sinking it?” he asks Kyoya, pouring tea into his now-empty teacup, smiling at the girls perched on the couch opposite to them. “Aren’t you sinking yourself, then?”

“I’m not holding the box.”

“Are you sure?”

“What box?”

*

“I think I understand it now,” Hani-senpai says, watching him carefully. He looks both five and fifty, somehow, and Kaoru wouldn’t want to play cards against him. “Kyoya is Kao-chan’s cake.”

Kaoru smiles, because oh, boy.

“How so?”

“Your breath caught just now, when he walked into the room, and you weren’t even looking at him,” Hani explains patiently, licking frosting off a spoon, and it makes Kaoru feel stupidly fond of him, how he can eat three cakes in a row, but he’ll still use proper cutlery, no matter how small and inadequate. “It’s funny to say it like that, that one’s breath catches, but it’s just like that, a door closing, lock sliding into place,” he goes on, and gasps as a demonstration. “See what I mean? Like you were open, waiting for someone to appear, and now that he’s back, your chest can close around him all over again.”

Kaoru blinks at him.

“That doesn’t make any sense, senpai.”

“Sure it does. It’s a bit stupid, I admit, but that’s how it is. Would you like some cake?”

Pretending that he’d _share_.

“What you’re describing sounds like relief,” Kaoru says, and sighs, wondering if pointing out the crumbs all over Hani’s mouth would be too condescending. “I’m far from relieved at the moment, you know?”

“It’s not relief at all if you can have that person in your chest only for an hour or two at a time,” Hani says, shaking his head. “Or maybe it’s a door opening, not closing? Anyhow, I’m not too good at metaphors, but I can recognize when someone looks at another person the way kids look at candy stores.”

Kaoru wonders if it’s possible for Kyoya to miss something that Hani wouldn’t, and slumps his shoulders to make himself smaller, small enough that people won’t notice that he’s not watching Kyoya so deliberately that watching him would be subtler.

“Kids never have enough pocket money to buy all that fancy candy, though, do they?” Kaoru says. “And their parents won’t buy it for them, because what if their teeth will hurt, after?”

Hani turns his head, and stares at Kaoru like Kaoru’s just said something ridiculous.

“Kao-chan,” he says, sugar-slow. “Have you never shoplifted, then?”

Kaoru laughs loud enough to turn heads, and he doesn’t check to see if Kyoya looked over at them, too, he refuses to, he won’t.

“I’m not going to say that everything is possible, because we both know that’s not true,” Hani says, and smiles sweetly at that ridiculous cake spoon. “But if Henry VIII started Protestantism in England just because he didn’t want to be married to some lady, I’m sure there’s a way to go around how our world works for love.”

Kaoru smiles at the big word, and decides that Hani, for all his wisdom, doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Clearly, he hasn’t seen how tight Kyoya keeps his shoulders even when no one should be looking, even when no one is.

“What kind of dessert do you suppose they serve in that fancy place he’s taking her to?”

Hani frowns, and pats Kaoru on the shoulder.

“Oh, I’ve checked,” he says, solemn. “It’s all French, eclairs, madeleines, and macarons in colors I didn’t even know existed.”

He throws his hands up in the air, and this time it’s Kaoru who pats him on the shoulder.

“I’m sure Kyoya will have them pack some for you,” he consoles him. “Anyway, senpai, I’d be grateful if you didn’t mention this whole Kyoya thing to anyone.”

Hani blinks at him innocently.

“Kyoya who?”

Kaoru laughs and laughs at the irony of it all until his stomach hurts, and then some.

*

“So what’s her name again?” Kaoru asks, trying to sound as bored and disinterested as possible, like Kyoya’s impending date is last Christmas’s toy, running out of battery and charm. “Emiko something?”

It’s Himekawa Eiko, she’s Kaoru’s age, her birthday is on the second of March, she looks great in silk but wears velvet, and her family’s in pharmaceutics. She has dimples when she smiles, but she doesn’t smile, and her waist’s slim enough that Kyoya could circle it with his hands, only Kaoru can’t imagine Kyoya touching anyone like that, ever. He can imagine Tamaki kicking him under a kotatsu, and he can imagine Kyoya pretending to mind, but he can’t imagine much more than that.

“I’m sure you know all about her,” Kyoya says, and doesn’t stop typing. He doesn’t look up, either, Kaoru’s careful carelessness and bored expression wasted on him.

“I do not,” Kaoru insists, trying not to sound defensive. Hikaru doesn’t go through his laptop, but he’s had to delete his search history, anyway, just in case.

Kyoya sighs as if he knows better, saves the document he’s working on, and indulges him, listing off all the facts that Kaoru already knows, and his voice sooths so good but his words grate so bad.

“She sounds…” wonderful, terrific, impressive, awful, undeserving, like she should go to hell, _straight to hell_ “adequate.”

“I wouldn’t associate myself with her otherwise,” Kyoya says, and resumes typing. Conversation over, only Kaoru’s a spoiled child about to grow up, and so he leans over and hits a few random keys until the laptop pings, scatters Kyoya’s papers until they’re out of order and all over, musses Kyoya’s hair up until he looks like he’s just woken up.

“Well, have fun, then, and make sure to have the girl home by curfew!” he says, and winks, because that’s what Hikaru would do to sell it, only Hikaru wouldn’t need to sell it, he’d mean it. “Oh, and stay safe~”

All Kyoya will do is take her hand to help her out of the limo, but that alone is too much, more than Kyoya should have to do and more than Kaoru can stand.

*

“Say,” Kaoru says as Tamaki’s closing the piano, the two of them the last people in the room. “Would you still love Haruhi if she were a boy?”

Tamaki stares at him, clearly confused.

“She’s a girl, though.”

“Yeah, I suppose she is, but what if she wasn’t?”

Tamaki starts packing up his homework in silence, as if he’s really thinking it over.

“To be honest, half the time I forget that she’s a girl. Or, well, maybe not forget, but she’s just Haruhi, you know?”

“I don’t,” Kaoru says, just to be cross. “Why her?”

Tamaki smiles like nothing bad has ever happened to him.

“Who else?”

Kaoru hates how there’s an answer to that question on the tip of his tongue, but nothing on Tamaki’s, nothing at all.

*

“You should wear this to that dinner,” Kaoru says, handing Kyoya a silk tie. “It will match her dress.”

“You had people spy on her family’s property just to establish what she’d wear?”

“Of course not,” Kaoru scoffs. “I’m perverted enough that I snuck onto the property and climbed a tree to watch her change.”

“Was your mother asked to supply the dress by any chance?” Kyoya guesses, and Kaoru smiles wide enough that it should fool him. He doesn’t even mind that much, anymore, only he’d like to see Kyoya wear the tie and thumb at it, touching the silk and not touching Himekawa Eiko, candlesticks and flowers and vinegar bottles between them.

“Not telling.”

“How do you know it will go with my suit?” Kyoya asks, cheekier than usual, and Kaoru grins, pulling out a smart jacket. Kyoya’s smile is almost there, and almost fond, and it’s alright, because Hikaru’s too busy to notice, and Hani will pretend that he didn’t see.

*

“Why Tamaki?” Kaoru asks Haruhi, closing her textbook and folding his hand on top of it to keep her from opening it again.

“Who else?” she says, and Kaoru shakes his head and laughs and laughs and laughs.

*

On the night of Kyoya’s date, Kaoru goes to a bar and almost kisses a boy.

It’s a seedy little place, and beer tastes like someone must have already been drunk when they invented it. There are people all around, hair sweat-glued to their foreheads and their glasses sweating, too, even though Kaoru’s cold and hasn’t taken off his scarf. It’s a nice scarf, and when the boy reaches over to thumb at it, Kaoru almost swats his hand away. The boy smiles, all dimples, all teeth, and Kaoru, who usually doesn’t remember how to stop flirting with people, forgets how to flirt.

“Do you come here often?” the boy asks, and Kaoru shakes his head, too exhausted to reply. The boy is wearing jeans, and so Kaoru imagines Kyoya in jeans. He laughs himself silly over it, too, laughs himself right off the stool, and the boy’s hands are all over, trying to help him up. He’s picking Kaoru off the floor like Kaoru’s a broken glass, pieces of him everywhere, and when he leans in, there’s flakes of skin on his lips as if he gets nervous. Kaoru thinks, already half-drunk, that Kyoya must get so much more nervous than that boy in a flannel shirt and tennis shoes, and yet doesn’t bite his lip, won’t let it show.

“Do you know waltz?” he asks the boy, because if he does know it, then it’s not too late, Kaoru can still pretend. The boy shakes his head and leans in and in and in, breath all yeast, fast but slow, and Kaoru folds his palm between their lips without thinking, stares at it as if it’s not his, until he understands that he doesn’t want anything to happen after all.

The boy’s lips are warm when they touch his palm, and Kaoru thinks that Kyoya must be cold, oh so cold, no sweater to warm him because Kaoru’s hopeless, because he’s days late, because nothing is good enough and so nothing is, period.

“If you’ll excuse me,” he says, and tries to get off the stool, because he’s too drunk to remember that he already got off it. He stumbles outside, and it’s snowing, early snow. It looks like all of Kyoya’s papers torn to shreds and thrown up in the air, and Kaoru thinks that if he did tear them to pieces, Kyoya wouldn’t get mad, anyway. He’d just sigh, and make Kaoru coffee, and say something about pretending to be a kid, and reveal to have had a saved copy of everything all along.

Kyoya wouldn’t get angry, even if there wasn’t a saved copy.

Kaoru catches some of the snow on his tongue, and as it melts, it tastes lonelier than he can bear.

*

He waits sat next to the gate at the end of the Ootori estate driveway for almost an hour before Kyoya gets back, the car headlights blinding him and almost causing him to drop the beer bottle he’s been holding all this time. When Kyoya gets out of the limo, there’s snow in his hair, but his shoes gleam as if they’ve just been polished, as if he hasn’t gone anywhere at all, and Kaoru smiles, because maybe he hasn’t, maybe there was no Himekawa Eiko, no date, no macarons.

“Kaoru,” Kyoya says, and it’s his formal voice, as if he’s apprehensive. Kaoru gets up and tilts sideways, Kyoya’s hand shooting out to grip him by the arm before he can fall over. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“It’s a pleasure?” Kaoru says, and laughs, staring at his shoes. “I need to show you something.”

“I say you need to get to bed.”

Kaoru shakes his head and covers his mouth before talking so Kyoya doesn’t smell all the alcohol on his breath. He knows that Kyoya won’t ever kiss him, but he can’t have Kyoya never even wanting to.

Not that he wants to. Not that he ever will.

“I need to show you something first, alright? I just need to show you something real quick.”

Kyoya watches him for a moment, hands in his pockets.

“And then you’ll go to bed?”

“Promise,” Kaoru swears, and puts his hand on his heart, or at least where he thinks his heart is. It _is_ on the right, he’s sure, or should be, anyway.

Kyoya sighs, glances at Kaoru’s fingers – cold-red on the neck of the beer bottle – takes his gloves off and hands them to Kaoru.

“Well, then?”

“It’s at my place,” Kaoru says, and tips forward. Kyoya catches him, clumsy, and it must already be more physical contact than Himekawa Eiko should ever get, and it’s already more physical contact than Kaoru deserves, and he hates himself, because he’s not a girl, he’s not good, he’s not Tamaki, but oh, his nose is so cold and the sliver of skin between Kyoya’s scarf and shirt collar is so warm.

Kyoya steers him into the car, and Kaoru talks a mile a minute even though he shouldn’t be talking at all, nervousness causing his knee to jump. When they get there, he half-stumbles towards the house, dragging Kyoya by the arm, and once they’re inside, Hikaru asleep because Kaoru texted him that he was fine five times and spelled it right, Kaoru kicks off his shoes so as to not wake anyone up. Kyoya takes his off, too, and doesn’t touch Kaoru, but seems ready to, as if the moment Kaoru tilts to the side more than someone upright should, Kyoya’s hands will be on him to steady him.

It almost makes him try and fall over on purpose, just to have Kyoya touch him.

“Here, here,” he says, banging his hand on the wall, trying to find the light switch. Kyoya follows him into the attic and turns the desk lamp on. Just like that, they’re standing in a pool of gold light, and suddenly, for all the beer, Kaoru feels self-conscious. They’re surrounded by a dozen mannequins, and each of them is wearing a different sweater, a dozen more of those swung over the backs of chairs and hanging on the walls, unfinished.

“What’s all this?” Kyoya says, turning around to take it all in.

“Your birthday present,” Kaoru mumbles, loud enough to not have to repeat himself, quiet enough that maybe Kyoya won’t catch it after all.

“Excuse me?”

“The _real_ one, not like those stupid cufflinks. I wanted to give you a sweater to keep you warm, because you always seem cold, aren’t you cold? Only nothing was good enough, so I kept making new ones, and new ones, but nothing was good enough _still_, and then it was _too late_, your birthday had come and gone, and all I had to show for it was all this disgusting flaking skin from needles—”

He’s pricked his fingertips so many times that they’re a mess of peeled-off skin, and Kaoru has been careful to hide it, wearing gloves, putting his hands inside his pockets, using hand cream, but Kyoya notices now, and reaches out as if to grab Kaoru’s hand and examine it, only Kaoru can’t have that and snatches it away, cradling it like it’s broken. He makes a sound, too, even though he doesn’t mean to, a pathetic whine in the back of his throat, and he could talk for hours and never say half as much as that whine must be saying, judging by how Kyoya’s looking at him.

“All this is for me?” he asks, and he’s not the type to ask, he hears something and goes with it, doesn’t do the disbelief, and yet here he is, still looking around the room as if he really can’t believe it. “I don’t know what to say.”

“But you always know what to say,” Kaoru mumbles, staring at his shoes. “Always, always, always.”

“Not this time, no,” Kyoya says, watching Kaoru like he’s never seen him before, only he has, he’s the only one who has, lunulae and how Kaoru observes, and how he’s kind.

“Well, it’s all for you, and I know that it’s not good enough, or even good, but if you want, you can take it. Each of those will keep you warm, I know that much, and it’s not a kotatsu, either, but it’ll do the job. And I know that there’s macarons in colors I don’t even know the names of, and that’s better, too, but I just— I—”

He lets his hands drop, because it feels like rather than all the sweaters, he’s offering Kyoya himself, and Kyoya, all calculating eyes, all tilt of the head, must know it. What poor offering Kaoru makes, too, hair messy and snow-wet, breath all cheap beer, shoelaces undone and his fingers covered in blisters. No one would want him, no one would have him, no one would pay a cent for a minute of his time, and yet there’s Kyoya, looking at him like he doesn’t remember that money exists.

“Alright, you’ve shown me,” he says, too collected to see through it, too blurry to even try. “Now let’s get you to bed.”

There’s a couch in the attic, and Kyoya helps Kaoru unbutton his coat and looks for a blanket. He gets Kaoru water, too, and makes sure he drinks it in small sips. After, he even covers him with the blanket, as if Kaoru’s five, and Kaoru remembers five, wouldn’t mind going back to being too small to think, or drink, or fall in love.

“What if I die?” Kaoru says, and Kyoya laughs. Kaoru vows to remember it, because it happens so rarely, but he’s already too sleepy to, he’s already forgetting.

“No one dies from two beers,” Kyoya tells him, and Kaoru could swear that he thanks Kaoru, too, and that he presses the back of his hand to Kaoru’s forehead like a fussy mother, only as he’s about to make a comment about it, he drifts off, the ghost of a hand brushing hair off his forehead, and that’s all he wanted for Kyoya, anyway, to feel this warm.

The world would be quite alright, if everyone could.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> they'll get their shit together soon, i promise
> 
> thank you for reading and any feedback as always welcome and appreciated <3


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, I'm so sorry, I know this is like a month late but in my defense, this past month has been assignments and the virus (hope everyone's okay btw) and spontaneous moving back to my country of origin (what a dramatic way to put it...). Anyway, I'm home now, and have more time, so the next one shouldn't take me longer than a week or two :))

Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One _can’t_ believe impossible things.’

‘I dare say you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

~ Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass & What Alice Found There

Kaoru wakes up warm, but with a headache, and alone.

“Right,” he whispers into the quiet, and can’t quite remember what Kyoya’s fingers felt like on his skin. A shame, too, because he figures he won’t feel them again, figures Kyoya won’t even talk to him, not really, not in a way that would matter. He imagines him perfectly civil, always in a hurry to leave the room first, even though he’d make it seem like he wasn’t doing it, somehow.

Kaoru remembers not being able to stand upright, and understands why people keep getting drunk in spite of the headaches, to escape the headaches, a never-ending circle. He doesn’t know if he’s happy that there’s nothing that he can’t remember, and later he makes himself coffee per Kyoya’s recipe and doesn’t even wince at the first sip, is used to it never tasting right.

*

The first time they see each other after the sweater fiasco, Kyoya’s collar is more crisp than normal, something Kaoru didn’t think possible, and he’s holding his pen as if something bad will happen once he lets go, a twitch of a hand, a giveaway.

“How’s your head?” he asks, polite, pushing headache pills Kaoru’s way, and a glass of water, too. He won’t look at him, numbers reflected in his glasses, and Kaoru wants to say something spiteful, why date girls when you and your laptop are getting on so well?

He fakes a cough to get Kyoya to look at him, and feels pathetic even before it becomes clear that Kyoya won’t.

You’re really cold, did you know that, Kaoru thinks but doesn’t say that, either, remembering how Kyoya said that awful things must often come to his mind, only Kaoru won’t voice them most of the time. He thinks that somewhere inside Kyoya there must be a bit of soft tissue that, insignificant as Kaoru is, would go hard were he to say it, and so he keeps quiet, even though he’s ruined himself in Kyoya’s eyes, anyway, and what’s there to lose?

“It’s been two days,” Kaoru says, unnecessarily. “I don’t have a headache anymore, senpai.”

Kyoya still won’t look at him, only reaches out blindly to pull the glass back to his side.

“And the pills? What, should I keep them for next time?”

It’s like he’s five again, ready to do just about anything to provoke. He remembers how Hikaru held onto his hand once, said, come on, come on, let’s climb that wall, just because someone had said they wouldn’t, remembers the pain of a sprained ankle later.

No Hikaru now, holding his hand and urging him to break his neck, and yet here he is, trying to do so anyway.

“Will there be a next time, then?” Kyoya says, and he still won’t look at Kaoru, but sounds like he might consider doing so, depending on Kaoru’s answer. Kaoru wraps his arms around himself, feeling small, feeling cold, and realizes it must mean that Kyoya used to be warm, before. It near kills him, that he had even a splinter of such an impossibility, and let it fall out of his hands.

Schrodinger’s cats, dead, the whole lot of them.

“Would you be disappointed if there was?” Kaoru asks, curious, and thinks that he couldn’t stoop any lower if he kneeled and licked the heel of Kyoya’s shoe.

“That is not something worth consideration,” Kyoya says, fingers flying over the keyboard, and to hell with him and his very important business, can nothing ever wait? “All that matters, when such a problem arises, is how to fix it as smoothly as possible and as sparingly as possible, both in terms of money and time.”

There’s a suggestion of a theme in his head that Kaoru won’t speak of out loud, science-fiction, since Kyoya would make one perfect robot.

“If it cost nothing, no money, no time, if you just ignored it, would you be disappointed, then?” Kaoru insists, stilling Kyoya’s hands at the wrists with the press of his fingers. He almost laughs at how much he wants Kyoya to admit that he would be, how that answer would somehow hurt the least. Kyoya stares at their tangled hands, doesn’t move his, turns his head to look right in Kaoru’s eyes at last.

“I wouldn’t ignore it,” he says in that matter-of-fact way of his, two and two equals four, it’s raining outside, water is wet. “I wouldn’t,” he repeats, even though Kyoya of all people is not one to repeat, what with how redundant it is.

Except for when it isn’t.

“Oh,” Kaoru says, redundant, too, stupid, still five-years-old, no filter. Later, his foot bandaged too tight, his mother asked him why he’d climbed that wall, and he meant to say that Hikaru had made him, but instead he told her that he couldn’t not to, with how blue the sky had been just then. She stared at him like she couldn’t quite believe that he was five, and such an idiot all on his own.

“Now, is there anything else, or can I get back to work? Forgive me, but it’s quite a pressing issue I’m dealing here with—”

“No, of course,” Kaoru says, trying to keep the bitter out of his voice and down in his stomach where it belongs. “Sorry for bothering you.”

Kyoya goes back to staring at his laptop, but his shoulders seem to slump in relief only when Kaoru remembers, all fumbling, to move his hands away, and how heartless, when Kyoya never lets emotions show like that. Kaoru supposes he’s not worth hiding the aversion, not anymore, not beyond small talk, anyway. He’s tempted to linger, but smiles, a wobbly thing, and leaves instead, careful not to stare at Kyoya too much the rest of the afternoon. Of course, he stares anyway, and once catches Kyoya wincing and reaching back to try and finger a spot between his shoulder blades that must hurt from sitting in one position for too long. Kaoru watches, and doesn’t walk up to him, doesn’t move Kyoya’s arm away, doesn’t fold his hand over the ridges of his spine, doesn’t press, decided but gentle, doesn’t ask, here?

Doesn’t feel the not-quite smooth fabric of Kyoya’s shirt under his fingers, no matter how hard he tries.

*

Haruhi sits across from him during lunch break, and starts wordlessly pulling books out of her bag, enough hardbacks to explain her scoliosis. He raises his eyebrows, and she ignores the silent question, a determined set to her mouth.

“Explain this to me,” she says, squaring her shoulders and pointing to an equation she’s crossed out three times, with three different pens. “Please.”

It surprises him so much that she’d ask for help after all that he doesn’t realize, not before the bell rings, how she must be doing it to distract him, must have seen him moping and decided to try and comfort him the only way she knew how. He doesn’t acknowledge it, convinced she’d lower her head, embarrassed, spooked like something wild come from the forest, and only pats her on the head until her hair’s messy and her face is pulled into a scowl.

“See, here, the only reason you didn’t get it right is because you copied the formula wrong from the board,” he tells her, helping her shove the books back into her bag. “Forgot to wear your contacts today, have you?”

The scowl deepens, and he almost laughs, almost forgets.

*

Tamaki’s been sulking for three days by the time Kyoya sighs and deigns to acknowledge it. He folds his laptop closed, adjusts his glasses, and stares at Tamaki, expectant.

“You still haven’t said a word about how your date has gone.”

Kaoru quits what he’s been doing, which is playing tiddlywinks against himself, and looks over his shoulder, listens. He stares at Tamaki, remembers thinking that he’s only pretending to be a child half the time, corrects himself, because how _dare_ he.

He of all people should know—

“Did you like her?”

“Her conversational skills left nothing to be desired,” Kyoya says, impassive.

“Yes, but did you _like_ her?”

Best friends, the two of them, and look at Tamaki stomping all over it with an innocent smile.

“I’d be happy if you liked her. It’d make things easier,” he says when Kyoya doesn’t reply, voice gone quiet.

“Easier for who?” Kyoya says, just as quiet, and Tamaki blinks at him like he doesn’t understand.

“What do you mean?” he asks, and doesn’t give Kyoya the chance to explain, which is just as well, because Kaoru doubts that Kyoya would. “I’d like you to— I just— If you don’t have a choice, I’d want you to like how the lack of one will play out.”

Kyoya still won’t say anything, just watches, tilts his head like he’s considering something, and damn him for making Kaoru feel like he had touched his back after all, pressed between Kyoya’s shoulder blades until the pain went away, an intimate thing.

“I mean, I just want you to be ha—”

_“Don’t.”_

It takes Kaoru a moment to realize he’s the one who said it, even though it scratched on its way out of his throat. Hikaru stares at him like they haven’t known each other’s thoughts in a while, and, across the room, Haruhi’s the only one to glance at Kyoya. All eyes on him, Kaoru keeps his on Tamaki, and curls his fingers into almost-fists.

“Kaoru?”

“You have no right to say any of this, when you don’t have the faintest idea—” he says, frustrated, and remembers the weight of that key to Kyoya’s box and how he was supposed to be the only one to know it. “It’s not _yours_ to say.”

Tamaki stares at him, and then apologizes, bashful, even though he doesn’t even know what he’s apologizing for, and that makes Kaoru all the angrier. He swipes his blazer off the back of his chair, and leaves, keeping himself from slamming the door on his way out. Hikaru knows better than to follow, and the rest know better than to call after him, and when he steps outside, he can’t believe the blue of the sky.

He thinks there’s a bright side to all this, because surely, by now, Kyoya must be disappointed in him, even though Kaoru’s stunt just now cost him nothing, no money, no time.

*

Hikaru doesn’t ask, not for two days, and then, on Saturday evening, makes Kaoru coffee as best he can, and sits him down at the kitchen table.

“So imagine my surprise when I went to the Ootori residence to demand that Kyoya tell me what the hell is up with the two of you, only to have him open the door wearing one of those sweaters you’d spent weeks pricking your fingers over.”

Kaoru frowns, and tries to think of something to say.

“It couldn’t have been.”

“It _was._ I’d recognize it, don’t you think?”

Hikaru gives him a pointed look, and squeezes his hand over the table.

“Oh,” Kaoru says, and doesn’t quite believe it, anyway. “Which one was it?”

“Hey, what? Why are you even surprised? Didn’t _you_ give it to him?”

“Which one was it?” Kaoru insists, and Hikaru takes mercy on him, sighs, tells him.

“The _lilac _one?”

Hikaru nods.

“But _why_? It had uneven stitches, and too long sleeves, and a too wide neckline, and – _lilac_?”

Kaoru checked, that morning, but when he saw that the few nicest sweaters – the green and beige ones, the black cashmere – were still there, he didn’t bother.

“He knew I wasn’t you right away, too, even though I had a hat on,” Hikaru tells him, tapping on the back of Kaoru’s hand to urge him to drink some of the coffee. “I’m not sure how.”

Kaoru remembers all of Kyoya’s explanations, lunulae and hand cream and all that, and he doesn’t know how Kyoya would know instantly, either, thinks it must be something else, a wisp of hair, a blemish, a smell, something that even Kaoru wouldn’t know for just his.

“It just doesn’t add up,” he says, and stares at the table, tries not to think—

“What doesn’t?”

“_Nothing_ does.”

Hikaru watches him, worried, and then clears his throat. Kaoru already hates whatever it is he’s about to say, even though they’re separate enough by now that he doesn’t have a clue as to what it might be.

“When did it all start, anyway?”

Kaoru refuses to look at him.

“You should have asked me first, and not Kyoya,” he says, and knows he must sound petulant, but doesn’t care. “Why would you _do_ that?”

“I didn’t, actually. I was about to, but he looked kind of out of it, and— Oh, I don’t know! The sweater confused me and— What are you laughing at me for?!”

Kaoru can’t believe that he’s laughing himself, but his shoulders are shaking, so he must be.

“_Anyway_,” Hikaru says, glaring at him. “I apologised, said something about having the wrong address – oh, shut _up_ – and then, halfway home, I realized I should go back and yell at him for breaking your heart, only I decided to run here instead and see if there was anything of it left to save.”

Kaoru manages a smile at that, hates how everyone will treat him like an egg now, when they realize that he’s already broken to pieces.

“I have duct tape,” Hikaru jokes, voice weak.

“I thought you liked smashing things to bits, not putting them together?”

“Only when I’m the one to smash them, brother-dear,” Hikaru says, giving him a soft look that makes Kaoru think, yet again, that they’ve grown up faster than either of them thought they would. “And not when it’s you that’s in pieces, I don’t.”

Kaoru feels the emotion like a hand around his neck, tightening with the threat of making it hurt, and goes plaint, recognizes it and lets it stay. It’s the one thing that will, after all.

*

On Sunday, three cakes are delivered to their place, and Hikaru eats them alternating bites of different slices, no cutlery and frosting all over.

“See? They all love you,” he tells Kaoru through a mouthful of chocolate, and Kaoru smiles but doesn’t say anything, knows that not all of them love him, not at all. He goes outside, and tries to climb that wall again, shoelaces undone. When he falls, he doesn’t sprain anything, but all breath goes out of him as he hits the ground, until it feels like he’s back inside that stuffy trunk of a stolen car, waiting to be saved and realizing that what he’s really waiting for is a pair of pale, cold hands.

The next time he tries, he does manage to climb the wall, and over it, too, only when he drops to the ground on the other side, he realizes he can go anywhere but doesn’t want to.

He imagines himself trekking all the way to Kyoya’s house, seeing the sweater for himself, asking, what the hell? He doesn’t move, reminding himself of how Kyoya won’t look at him anymore, of how he’s either disappointed, or doesn’t care enough to be. He remembers what Kyoya said about nesting dolls back when it all started, and thinks that for a while, Kyoya bothered opening Kaoru like he was a set of those himself, only at some point, not having found anything interesting, must have decided it wasn’t worth his time.

He decides it must be courtesy, wearing the sweater, and doesn’t imagine what it must look like on Kyoya, _won’t. _

Later, picking leaves out of his hair, his mother scowls and asks him why in God’s name he’d climb that stupid wall when he could just use the gate, and he smiles at her, and at how she keeps plucking some of his hair out, too.

“I wanted to check if up there, the sky would be a little bit more blue.”

“Oh,” his mother says, fingers stilling. “Well, was it?”

Kaoru smiles.

“I don’t remember.”

*

The next time it happens, she has twice as many books, somehow, her bag bursting at the seams.

“Oh, sweet Haruhi,” Kaoru says, and she shoots him a glare and points to what she doesn’t understand, only who knows if she really can’t.

*

“So, how have you been?” Kaoru says, conversational, trying to sound like he couldn’t care less, even though it hurts. Kyoya raises his eyebrows as if he can see right through it, and doesn’t look away from the book he’s reading, damn him. This time he’s not working but perusing Machiavelli’s _The_ _Prince_, and it’s downright rude how he doesn’t even pretend that Kaoru is good company. Kaoru wonders if setting himself on fire would earn him a reaction, and considers sliding off the arm of the couch and onto Kyoya’s lap.

He would, too, if it wasn’t for how—

Well, he’s sure Kyoya must know it by now, must have figured it out, and yet there he is, avoiding so much as looking at Kaoru as if it pains him to see his face.

He supposes he can’t blame Kyoya for not bothering to tell him no outright, when Kaoru hasn’t even asked, only he wishes he could demand that ugly lilac sweater back, and why would Kyoya wear it anyway, if he hates him so much?

Kaoru’s not enjoying feeling like he doesn’t have skin.

*

Tamaki sulks even more but, after a few days, stares at Kaoru with a determined expression, and after the club activities, comes up to him to right all the wrongs, or some other such knightly thing.

Kaoru doesn’t know how to tell him that he loves him, he really does, it’s all good, and so he just looks at him expectantly until Tamaki blushes and starts examining his shoes.

“I wanted to apologise,” he says at last, fiddling his fingers.

“Have you changed your mind, then?” Kaoru teases, and Tamaki frowns at him.

“What?”

“You don’t want to apologise anymore, do you? You kind of implied that, what with the past tense—”

“Oh,” Tamaki says, the dawning of some profound realization all over his face, and Kaoru’s almost jealous, thinks that Tamaki must have learned how to act accordingly when it became clear he couldn’t hide his emotions, isn’t left fumbling, like Kaoru, years too late. “I can see why Kyoya would like you, I think.”

Only Kyoya doesn’t.

“You still don’t know what you’re apologising for, do you?” Kaoru asks, trying to keep the fondness out of his voice.

“Well, to be honest—”

“It’s alright, it’s alright,” Kaoru assures him, waving his hand. “You’re forgiven, anyway.”

He figures he’s bound to hate Tamaki for a while, for not seeing what he could have and not wanting it, anyway, when Kaoru would give—

He would give all the sky’s blue, and then some.

*

When the door to the attic creaks open, he expects Hikaru, and so doesn’t turn around.

“Did you bring cookies?” he asks, crossing out a failed sketch. Why design dresses when Kyoya could never wear one?

Kaoru’s sure it will pass. He just has to give it time.

“Well, no, I’m afraid I’ve come here empty-handed,” _not_-Hikaru says, and Kaoru sits up straight, gasps. “I could go and get some, and then come back, if it’s a pressing need?”

When Kaoru turns around in his chair, Kyoya’s wearing the cursed lilac sweater, sleeves too long indeed. Kaoru stares at his collarbones, and doesn’t imagine anything.

“I’ll survive,” he says, more quiet than he’d intended, almost a whisper. “You look idiotic.”

Kyoya doesn’t.

“Whatever do you mean?” he says, tilting his head, hands in his slacks’ pockets, as if he’s relaxed, only Kaoru knows him better than to believe he is, and figures it’s to keep his hands in check.

“Lilac’s not really your color.”

A lie.

Kyoya stares at him, and then smiles, brief and sharp.

“Well, that’s on you, though, isn’t it? You’re the one who made me a sweater that doesn’t suit me.”

Kaoru scowls at him.

“I made you _twenty_ sweaters, and can’t see why you’d choose _this_ one—”

“I liked it,” Kyoya says, in that weather-forecast tone of voice, don’t you know it’ll rain? “It seemed cosy.”

Kaoru blinks, stares, can’t remember even one other instance when Kyoya picked something because it was _cosy. _He remembers how all his pockets have straining seams from Kyoya shoving calculators inside them, and wonders at how they’ve all missed this, how Kyoya is a person that likes soft wool when cold, how he gets cold in the first place, and not just acts it.

He feels himself giving up, which is not unlike melting.

“Kyoya,” he says, and he knows he sounds weary, but he doesn’t care. He just wants to get this over and done with, and find Hikaru, and let him try and duct-tape his heart back together, let him fail. “Why are you here?”

Something softens in Kyoya’s expression, as if he can see it all over Kaoru, how it all hurts, and he must, he’d never miss it, even if he doesn’t care.

“I want to talk.”

Kaoru snorts.

“Oh, _now_ you want to talk.”

Kyoya arches an eyebrow.

“Yes, what?” Kaoru snaps. “Don’t you stand there and pretend— God, these past few days, it’s like you couldn’t stand to even look at me—”

“I couldn’t,” Kyoya admits, quiet like shame, and Kaoru stares, and then laughs, a sad, self-deprecating thing.

“Of course,” he says, and thinks, leave, leave, leave like you would, anyway. “_Of course_ you couldn’t.”

Kyoya frowns like he’s frustrated, and takes a step forward. Kaoru scrambles back, his spine hitting the edge of the desk, and Kyoya sighs and stops.

“You misunderstand.”

“I don’t think I am.”

“But you _are_,” Kyoya says, and steps forward again. “You think— I just couldn’t— I felt—”

Ootori Kyoya at a loss of words, what a sight.

“It’s just that you knew about the box, and so could take a look inside it anytime you wanted, so of course I couldn’t stand to look at you,” he explains, shoulders sagging. His hands are no longer in his pockets, making aborted gestures in the air, even though Kyoya never talks like that, more than words.

“But I’ve known what’s inside the box all this time, haven’t I? So what difference does it make—”

“Only you _haven’t_,” Kyoya interrupts, exasperated, and it’s so disturbing to see him like this that Kaoru wants to say, let’s take a five, and offer him tea just to have Kyoya’s breathing even out. “I didn’t even know myself, for quite a while, and if anyone should know, it’s me.”

“Kyoya,” Kaoru says, slow, tired and confused. He’s wearing stupid pajamas, and he looks like he hasn’t slept, because he hasn’t, and he longs to be somewhere else. “What on Earth are you talking about?”

“I wouldn’t think about it – I’m good at that, it’s like organizing drawers, you know, socks here, shirts there – only then there were all those sweaters, and I couldn’t not to,” Kyoya goes on, unfazed, something frantic about how he won’t move, but seems to need to. “And so I opened that stupid, stupid box and guess what, it wasn’t Tamaki in there.”

Kaoru stares at him, those glasses sliding too low, and doesn’t hope.

“I still don’t get what you’re saying,” he says, voice breaking on how it’s half a lie.

“Forget the boxes,” Kyoya says, eyes earnest. “You _know_ what I’m saying, do you really think I’d wear purple if it wasn’t for—”

“Lilac,” Kaoru corrects, unnecessarily, and when Kyoya scoffs and then smiles, almost fond, he wonders if that’s what Tamaki meant when he said that he could see why Kyoya liked him.

“Alright, _lilac_,” Kyoya says, and steps even closer, which is already quite close, what with there being a desk behind Kaoru’s back, what with how he has nowhere to run, what with how he might not want to, anyway. “My point stands.”

“So what, you had this huge realization that you’re into disaster people who wear cardigans and draw Mussolini caricatures all over your homework, and then still wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t say a word—”

“_Yes_,” Kyoya admits, and looks thoughtful. “I suppose I wouldn’t. I was— hesitant. Surely, you understand?”

Kaoru doesn’t want to, but does, and smiles wryly, salutes, too.

“Oh, I certainly see why you’d be hesitant. I just don’t see why you’d stop hesitating.”

Kyoya smiles, something self-deprecating about it. He tugs at the hem of the sweater, revealing a strip of pale skin, and points to the initials Kaoru has sewn onto the underside of it, selfishly, his own.

“A signature, if you will,” Kaoru says, feeling himself blush. The letters are lilac, too, barely visible, and he hoped that Kyoya, for all his perceptiveness, wouldn’t notice. “Like with paintings.”

“Yes, I know,” Kyoya says, even though he doesn’t, doesn’t have the first idea about how Kaoru imagined the letters pressing against Kyoya’s skin, pricked his finger, thought he would at least have that. “It’s just that I thought that if I kept wearing this sweater – even if I _wouldn’t_ – it’d start ripping at some point, and then I’d have to have it mended. Only, see, when I imagined anyone other than you mending it, I knew I would never stand it.”

Kaoru stares at him, stood three feet away and telling him in his own, strange way that Kaoru might be worth the cost that Kyoya can’t exactly know yet, and he whines, a high sound in the back of his throat. Kyoya tilts his head, and Kaoru says, alright, says, please, says, my God, reaches out and pulls Kyoya close, and Kyoya follows his hands as if he, too, knows how to melt. He stares at Kaoru like this time he can’t stand to look away, and sinks his fingers in Kaoru’s hair, and opens his mouth like he wants to say something, only doesn’t seem to have any words left.

He doesn’t need any.

Kaoru lets Kyoya kiss him and kiss him and kiss him, and laughs how Kyoya has tricked them all, how all this time, he kept pretending that he didn’t know how to be warm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is, of course, not the end. We're, I don't know, 2/3 in? Anyway, thanks for reading and don't hesitate to leave a comment if you have any thoughts <3 (or if you don't have any thoughts but want to leave one, anyway)


	7. Chapter 7

“Well, now that we _have_ seen each other,” said the Unicorn, “if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?”

~ Lewis Carroll, _Through the Looking-Glass & What Alice Found There_

The next morning, he drinks a disgusting coffee that Kyoya hasn’t made him, and doesn’t mind.

“You look – reluctantly happy?” Hikaru tells him, watching him across the table.

There’s something Kaoru’s been thinking about, how sometimes when you get to the top of a mountain, you’re only allowed to be happy for a moment, because it’s not _really_ the top, what, are you stupid?

“I _am_ happy,” Kaoru promises. “It might be temporary.”

Hikaru watches him in silence for a moment.

“That’s everything, though, no? Hey, make sure to button up your shirt properly to cover those marks there all over your neck, what even, my, my, brother dear—”

Kaoru throws a teaspoon at him, and Hikaru grins when it hits him on the forehead.

*

“I have plastic bags in my pocket in case you start hyperventilating,” Hikaru whispers before they walk into the club room. Once they’re inside, Kaoru does hyperventilate a little, but in the end, Kyoya doesn’t even look up from his laptop at the other end of the room.

“Is now too early for the hurt-him-and-I’ll-kill-you talk?” Hikaru whispers theatrically, and Kaoru sighs, elbows him, catches Kyoya looking, doesn’t manage to smile on time.

Paintings, today, Haruhi as the Girl with a Pearl Earring, and Tamaki as The Knight of Flowers, armor painted colorful. Hani’s absorbed in imitating Munch’s _Scream_ every minute of the day, Mori, comically, wearing a sheet painted appropriate colors over his head to stand behind him and be his background. Tamaki wanted Kaoru and Hikaru to be Raphael’s twin angels, but Hikaru vetoed it and insisted on being Mona Lisa. Kaoru watches him adjust his wig and practice a ‘mysterious smile’ in front of a mirror, and shakes his head, fond.

No one insisted on them being a pair, and he doesn’t know if it makes him happy or sad.

Kaoru himself is meant to be Van Gogh from his self-portrait, fake beard and fake gauze taped to his still very much present ear.

He can’t imagine cutting it off for someone he loves, if only because he doesn’t think Kyoya would appreciate an unhygienic gift like that.

Not that he loves Kyoya.

Well—

He does take one of Hikaru’s plastic bags, just then.

Later, he sits down next to Kyoya, stretching his legs. Kyoya’s some unidentified Klimt, dressed in gold and picking on the flashy fabric with an irritated pull to his mouth.

“You’re awfully quiet today,” Kaoru says, and Kyoya raises an eyebrow in reply.

“I have things to think through.”

Kaoru huffs a laugh. _Things_.

“Don’t think too much, alright?”

Kyoya watches him in silence for a minute, and Kaoru waits for him to say that Kaoru’s not worth the costs. There’s the calculator, after all, thrown aside by Kyoya earlier in the afternoon like it’d done him wrong.

“Don’t worry,” Kyoya says, voice level. “I’m not going to think myself out of liking you.”

Kaoru hums, but doesn’t quite believe it. Kyoya’s life is meant to be an uphill but pretty straightforward road, and Kaoru can’t imagine him letting himself be frivolous enough to dig in the bushes or walk off the trail.

And there’s Tamaki, anyway, dressed in flowers, and Van Gogh should have known that ears had nothing on roses.

*

Later, Tamaki catches Kaoru by the elbow.

“We should talk.”

Kaoru sighs, agrees.

“Go on, then,” Tamaki says to Hikaru, waving his hand dismissively. Hikaru looks like he’s considering kicking him, but only mumbles something under his nose and leaves dutifully. “What a brat.”

Tamaki points to the couch, but Kaoru settles on the windowsill instead. In the afternoon light, Tamaki’s hair is El Dorado gold, and Kaoru can’t for the life of him figure out why Kyoya would—

Why _Kaoru_.

“I know that you all think I’m stupid, but I figured it out, you know,” Tamaki says, pouring himself a cup of tea from the kettle in a practiced way, so that the liquid never splashes, doesn’t make a sound. “This Kyoya business.”

For a second, Kaoru thinks that Tamaki means Kyoya and himself, and his heart skips a beat, _is that it, then? _

Then he realizes.

“Oh.”

“I just want you to know—” Tamaki starts, stops, puts his teacup away. It sloshes, now, tea all over the saucer, and Kaoru can’t help but smile at it. “It’s going to be difficult, this.”

He points to Kaoru like he means Kaoru’s whole self. Kaoru looks down at his cardigan and adjusts it, self-conscious.

“Have you thought about how to make his father like you at all?” Tamaki goes on, and Kaoru stares at him, confused. Their Tono, all responsible, who would have thought?

“I’m still stuck on how I somehow made _Kyoya_ like me, to be honest,” Kaoru says softly, and Tamaki gives him an incredulous look.

“You didn’t _make_ him anything,” he insists. “Kyoya’s very independent in his own way, you know, I can’t imagine him being made to like anything, or anyone, for that matter, though not for luck of trying.”

Kaoru arches an eyebrow. Tamaki sighs.

“Another dinner date, has he not told you?” he explains, adding milk to the tea. “They seem to want to marry him off fast.”

“Everything’s temporary, no?” Kaoru echoes Hikaru, and Tamaki gives him a sharp look.

“Kyoya deserves better than this,” he says, stern, and Kaoru plucks at his cardigan again.

“Well, now, I know _that_—”

“I don’t mean _you_,” Tamaki interrupts. “All I mean is it takes two to tango.”

Kaoru grins, jumps off the windowsill, bows, holds out a hand.

“If you please?”

Tamaki smiles and takes a rose, fitting it between Kaoru’s lips.

“Wonderful,” he says kindly, and Kaoru wonders if that’s what he’s like with Haruhi now that the novelty has worn off, quiet, thoughtful, and fond. “I believe in you, Kaoru, but you have to believe in yourself a little, too. And in Kyoya. He hasn’t let us down yet, has he?”

Kaoru doesn’t tell him that he wouldn’t be let down if Kyoya forgot him and married some rich heiress, only resigned, because Tamaki might be smarter than he looks, but Kaoru doesn’t think he’d be able to wrap his head around _that._

*

“You knew I was heading to the library, too,” Kaoru says when he finds Kyoya at a window table, poring over books. “Why not invite yourself along, then? Avoiding me, already?”

“I find you distracting,” Kyoya says without looking up from his work, and Kaoru smiles, decides to take it as a compliment, and takes a seat across from Kyoya, ready to distract away.

*

“You should spy on them,” Hikaru says, and Kaoru listens, because he’s an idiot.

*

Kyoya calls Kaoru on the day of the date, and still won’t mention it. Kaoru goes along with it, pretending not to know, the phone trapped between his shoulder and his ear as he makes himself a cup of tea. Kyoya should be leaving soon, but he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry, explaining bee migration patterns in a monotone voice on request. It was the first thing that came to Kaoru’s mind, anything to make Kyoya talk to him, and maybe he would never hang up, maybe he would never leave? He makes sure to interrupt him with a question every now and then, and Kyoya doesn’t sigh once, answers each and every one even though he must know that Kaoru couldn’t care less about ‘unplanned absconding’.

Kaoru’s been scared to ask Kyoya—

Such a simple question, what is this, what are we, where are we going?

Too much of a coward, scared Kyoya would say, why, nowhere, what ‘we’?

“Hey, are we going or what?” Hikaru says, appearing in the doorway, coat half-on, and Kaoru grips his phone tight and waits for Kyoya to say that he has to go.

Kyoya doesn’t, and doesn’t, and doesn’t, and then does.

“Alright,” Kaoru says, but doesn’t drop the phone. “Let’s go,” but he doesn’t move.

“You know what,” Hikaru says, thoughtful. “I don’t think it was too early for the hurt-him-and-I’ll-kill-you talk at all.”

*

Earlier that day, Hani said:

“Kao-chan, you’re terrible at shoplifting.”

Kaoru laughed and laughed and laughed.

*

It’s a nice place. Of course it is. Fancy candles and a chandelier that would kill you if it fell on you, all crystal. Immaculate waiters, all of them with cropped hair, and Kaoru wonders if it’s a precaution of a sort. He imagines a place like this would close down if someone found a hair in their purée or something dramatic like that. A star down at least, anyway.

He and Hikaru are sat three tables from Kyoya and the girl, both of them in wigs, and both of them in hats. Hikaru, devoted to the cause, has a moustache, too, a pencil one that makes him look like a failed politician.

“He’s going to see right through it,” Kaoru says, tugging at his bowtie. Hikaru insisted on it, an ugly thing, polka dots all over.

“Only if he sees us,” Hikaru says, and winks. If Kyoya doesn’t look over his shoulder, they’re safe, but if Kyoya doesn’t look over his shoulder, won’t it mean that his date is too absorbing to get distracted?

_I find you distracting. _

The girl, whatshername, is beautiful. All long flowy hair, all straight teeth.

“Like a healthy horse,” Hikaru agrees, and Kaoru chokes on his water. There’s lime in it.

Her dress matches the restaurant’s décor, too, and Kaoru wonders if it’s on purpose. He hates her, and knows it’s stupid of him. For all he knows, she doesn’t want to be here, either.

“So what do you fancy we should eat?” Hikaru says, poring over the menu. “I’m paying.”

Kaoru arches an eyebrow.

“You mean our parents are paying?”

Hikaru waves a hand.

“Same difference.”

Kaoru considers ice cream. Hikaru orders turkey for both of them, and Chardonnay, too.

“I don’t really feel like eating,” Kaoru says. “_Or_ drinking.”

“Well, too bad,” Hikaru hisses. “We’re here incognito, compadre, gotta fit in.”

“_Compadre_?”

Hikaru shrugs.

“It goes with the moustache.”

“I think I was adopted.”

“We look the same.”

“Save for the moustache.”

“Also I have better hair.”

Kaoru sighs and, three tables away, Kyoya laughs, quiet, but loud enough to catch.

“Do you think he’ll keep me as a mistress?” he sighs, and Hikaru kicks him under the table. “_What?_ I’m not saying I’d agree, but I’d at least consider it, you know—”

Another kick, harder now.

The turkey arrives after twenty minutes, cold.

“Don’t you know? It’s cold on purpose.”

Kaoru pokes it with his fork, doubtful.

“Is it dry on purpose, too?”

“This is a five-star restaurant, so I’d assume so,” Hikaru says, reluctant to try the meat himself. “Now, in the name of love!”

He’s visibly trying not to frown as he’s chewing, and Kaoru keeps himself from laughing at him because he is being very brave.

And then, he doesn’t really feel like laughing, because those three tables away, Kyoya still is.

“In the name of love,” he echoes, and takes a bite of the turkey himself, staring at whatshername’s glossy hair. His own hair is, of course, far from glossy. His suit doesn’t match the décor, either.

“I can’t believe he didn’t tell me,” he says, or tries to, the turkey stuck on the way down his throat. He starts choking and reaches for the glass of water, only there’s tears in his eyes now, and he misses, knocking it over instead. He watches the wet stain spread all over the tablecloth, still coughing, and Hikaru gives him a worried look. Kaoru shakes his head and gets up, chair legs screeching. As he rushes off to the bathroom, he hopes that Kyoya’s still laughing and laughing, oblivious.

*

“That was quite something,” Kyoya says in a cool voice, and Kaoru, one leg already over the ledge of the bathroom window and the other still on the heat radiator, starts and tumbles to the ground.

“_Ouch_.”

“Serves you right,” Kyoya grumbles, clearly irritated, and Kaoru stares up at the white ceiling and wonders if it’s all a cruel dream. Once he coughed up the damned turkey, he decided to bolt, but alas!

“How’s the date going?” he inquires, trying for conversational. Kyoya sighs and helps him get up, dusting his jacket off for him like Kaoru’s a child he has to fuss over. 

“What’s all this, then?” he says, frowning at Kaoru. Kaoru stares at him, amazed.

“You know,” he says. “I haven’t seen you irritated for quite a while.”

“That’s because I have a lot of self-control,” Kyoya snaps. “You’re irritating alright, trust me.”

Kaoru smiles.

“And distracting?”

“That, too,” Kyoya admits, and his expression softens a bit. “I suppose I deserve the stalking, for not having told you.”

“Precisely,” Kaoru nods, adjusting Kyoya’s tie. “So why haven’t you, then?”

He expects, even after everything, a cold sort of a ‘it’s none of your business, now, is it?’.

Kyoya’s expression goes softer still, as if he can see it all over Kaoru’s face.

“Because I knew you’d think about it,” he says, quiet. “Think and think and think, and worry.”

“Well, how could I not worry when—”

“_I’d take care of it_,” Kyoya insists, confident, and Kaoru stares at him. He’s starting to see how he got it all wrong.

“So you didn’t want me to worry,” he says slowly, and Kyoya tilts his head, which, Kaoru’s come to know, is a yes. “Hell, Kyoya, I’m not china.”

Kyoya huffs, irritated, and then walks off a few steps and grips the edge of a washbasin.

“It’s not that I think that these things would break you,” he says quietly. “It’s just that I don’t want them to even so much as _try_.”

It’s strangely earnest, but Kaoru doesn’t believe him, anyway.

“You _do_ think so,” he says, amused. “And it’s high time you stopped.”

“You’re one to talk,” Kyoya says, irritated. “You think I don’t even _like_ you, even though I _told_ you— Do you really think I go around kissing people I don’t care about?”

“Alright,” Kaoru says softly, and strangely, even though he knows everything will be unbearably difficult once they leave this stupid bathroom, he feels light as a feather. “You care about me, _fine_. Let me care about you back, then, how about that?”

For a moment, Kyoya looks childishly wronged, as if he’s about to say no. Then his shoulders relax, and he sighs, the beginnings of a smile tugging at his lips.

“_Fine_,” he concedes. “You _heathen_.”

Kaoru beams.

“What have you done with the wig, anyway?”

“You’ll find that one of the toilets doesn’t flush,” Kaoru says, grinning wickedly. “I didn’t mean to?”

“Sure you didn’t,” Kyoya says with an indulgent smile. “And how’s your back?”

“It wasn’t a long fall, but I wouldn’t mind if someone kissed it better.”

Kyoya shakes his head and dusts off his own shirt.

“Off you go, then, before the poor girl thinks you bailed on her,” Kaoru says, and smiles like it’s alright. Maybe it will be, soon.

Later, he goes back to his own table, too, and Kyoya doesn’t look over at them even once, but it feels like he’s watching, anyway. Kaoru makes sure to laugh loudly, distracting indeed, and drinks the Chardonnay in small sips.

“What’s with you?” Hikaru asks, watching him, chin in hand. “You’re all— excited.”

“It’s crazy, but suppose instead of waiting for this whole thing with Kyoya to end, I tried to make it last, instead?”

Hikaru grins.

“_Now_ we’re talking.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one didn't have much fluff in it, I know, but I'll try to make up for it... maybe.... Also, Kyoya's family incoming 
> 
> Also, I'm pretty sure what I wrote about Van Gogh is 50% bullshit, but that's what my cousin told me when I was small and it stuck. In reality, he didn't cut his ear off because of love, but most likely because of a fight with Gaugain (And they were roommates, g a s p). And he gave it to some girl, yeah, but I don't think she was the love of his life, or anything like that. Also, I couldn't think of a theme, and only thought of this one beeecause I've started posting an original story about stupid boys who get involved in art theft. It's very gay and very angsty and here's a link if you're interested: **https://archiveofourown.org/works/23463895/chapters/56249917**
> 
> Thank you for reading <333


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a very bad and a very short chapter. I'll do better next time (which, by the way, will be the last time because we only have one chapter to go, yay!)

“Well, in _our_ country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, _here_, you see, it takes all the running _you_ can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

~ Lewis Carroll, _Through the Looking-Glass & What Alice Found There_

Once, their mother asked Kaoru if he believed in heaven.

(Other parents, he knew, would tell their children that <strike>heaven didn’t exist, heaven would be here on Earth if they made enough money, and they _would _</strike>heaven existed, rather than ask their opinion on the matter.)

“You mean angels, and fluffy clouds, and all that?”

“Yes,” his mother laughed. “All that.”

“Well, if me and Hikaru can go there together, then sure, why not, I don’t mind it if heaven exists, but I’m think we’re more suited for hell.”

“Oh, you _don’t mind _it, huh?” she teased, and then hummed thoughtfully. “I myself very much believe that heaven exists. I think that it’s a place where you have everything, but can lose it all with one misstep and end up with nothing.”

It sounded eerily familiar. Kaoru stared at her, and wondered why she seemed amused rather than sad.

“That’s why I’d rather go to hell,” Kaoru he said after giving it some thought. He was eight years old, had skinned knees with gravel and his brother all over them, and he’d let his mouth fill with spit because he thought that he wouldn’t have to drink water if he drank that instead. He was a stupid kid, but one half of a heir, grass stains and dandelion seeds, but French lessons and bowties. “At least hell is consistent.”

“Heaven is not where you’ll end up, no,” his mother agreed, tilting her chin at their house, turrets, ornaments, money. “Heaven is where you already are, and good luck to you, because you’ll need it, to avoid getting kicked out.”

Years later, he laughs and laughs and laughs.

*

“I figured it out,” Kyoya tells him, not looking away from his laptop, which, Kaoru understands now, can be more of a compliment and acknowledgement than glancing at him would be. “Your favorite flower.”

“Oh?” Kaoru says, intrigued, and doesn’t admit that he thought Kyoya had forgotten all about it. “Do tell.”

They’ve been going on walks, no hand-holding, a careful distance between them, and Kaoru climbs low fences only to pretend to trip and have Kyoya steady him, only for those three seconds of contact that isn’t suspicious enough to be worth a tabloid photo. Kyoya wears the lilac sweater all the time, to the point where Kaoru’s not sure when he has the chance to wash it, only it always smells clean, even if Kaoru is hardly ever close enough to Kyoya to smell it. Everything is wonderful, awful, lovely, painful, a dream, a nightmare, can this never end, when will this finally be over, relief and agony.

“I’ve read _Through the Looking Glass_, back to back, twice,” Kyoya tells him, sentences Kaoru doesn’t understand reflected in his glasses. The day before, Kyoya let Kaoru drag him to his house, let Kaoru sit him down on Kaoru’s bed and waited with his head cocked to the side as Kaoru stood with his back to the door and watched him. “_Oh, Tiger Lily, I wish you could talk._”

Kaoru recognizes it, smiles.

“_We can talk, when there’s anybody worth talking to_.”

Kyoya smiles back.

“Do you think that’s what I’m like? Waiting for someone interesting enough to make me speak?” Kaoru teases, and Kyoya tilts his head back and laughs, a full sound that causes girls all over the room to send him curious glances.

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “That’s what _I_’m like, and you know it very well.”

Neither of them speaks for close to a minute, and Kaoru watches Kyoya, wondering if they’re already banished from that country of no missteps his mother calls heaven.

“Self-centred, are we?” he teases at last.

“In love, are we?” Kyoya shoots back, matter-of-fact, and Kaoru sighs but doesn’t argue, because he’s done lying.

*

A book Hikaru loves, a book Kaoru hates, a book Kaoru loves, a book Hikaru will never hate, and they hold it by the covers and tug, each walking the opposite way, until it splits at the spine and all the pages fly out.

Hikaru says, I loved growing up with you, and Kaoru says, I hated growing up without you, and Hikaru says, I loved growing up without you, and Kaoru says, I hated growing up with you, and some of those are truths, and some of them are lies, only the lies are true, and the truths are all lies.

“Do you think it would have been easier, had we been in love with each other?” Hikaru asks, and Kaoru thinks, but I half-_was_.

“We were in Stockholm Syndrome with each other,” he says instead, and Hikaru laughs. They don’t cut their palms open and don’t shake on this small goodbye of a sort.

“With twins, are there two umbilical cords, or just one?” Kaoru wonders aloud, and Hikaru pushes his hair back off Kaoru’s forehead to kiss it.

“I don’t know,” he says, smiling fondly. “I say let’s never find out.”

They shake on that, at least.

*

There’s a plan Kyoya has that Kaoru is going to ignore.

Kyoya doesn’t know about it, and he won’t, not until it’s too late.

It’s Akito who welcomes him at the door to the Ootori residence, and Kaoru does his best to keep himself from scowling.

Kaoru _despises _Akito.

“Why, hello, Kaoru,” Akito says, not bothering to hide his own scowl. “To what do I owe the pleasure? Kyoya’s not here, you know.”

_You weren’t meant to be here, either. _

“I was in the neighborhood,” Kaoru explains hurriedly, and pushes past Akito, already kicking off his shoes. “I’ll only be a minute.”

“But what— Hey, wait a moment—”

Kyoya has different pairs of socks for different activities, the nerd – sleeping, school, winter, summer, and homework socks. He keeps the ones he changes into after dinner parties folded under his pillow, and Kaoru smiles when he slips that tiniest matryoshka that didn’t match the set that Kyoya hid it inside all those months before into one of the pair.

“For safekeeping,” he whispers, and imagines that Kyoya will hate him a little when he finds it after whatever important semi-function Fuyumi dragged him to.

Whatever semi-important function good enough for Ootori Yoshio’s children, but not for the man himself.

“Are you quite finished?” Akito asks after clearing his throat in a very obnoxious manner. Kaoru pats Kyoya’s pillow flat and glances over his shoulder, flashing Akito a brilliant smile. He’s leaning on the doorway, all impatient, as if Kaoru has been here for hours, eating his food, asking for seconds, and refusing to leave.

“Yes, _quite_,” he teases, and tilts his head. “Thank you for your hospitality.”

When he leaves the Ootori residence, he mutes his phone.

*

It was the strangest thing to ever happen to Kaoru, no contest, Kyoya cross-legged in his bed and no phone or calculator in hand, hair mussed and hands flying as he talked about Harbin of all places.

“I’d just like to go there, is all,” he explained, calm but with a note of almost-sheepishness when Kaoru raised an eyebrow. “A pipe dream.”

Harbin, a winter wonderland that Kaoru would have never guessed Kyoya cared for.

“You _can_ go to Harbin,” Kaoru argued. When he’d reached out to take off Kyoya’s glasses before, Kyoya let him, but closed his eyes against it, like he thought it would hurt him, eyelashes like shadow-play on skin. “You _should_ go to Harbin.”

“I can’t be as excited about it as I was at five, though.”

“I don’t know. You seem plenty excited to me.”

Kyoya scowled at him.

“For the next few years, it will never matter what I want, not for a minute. You’re the only indulgence I’ll be allowed, and even that is a stretch.”

Kaoru hummed.

“Maybe I’d rather you had Harbin instead of me.”

“I’d rather have you, thank you very much,” Kyoya said, so dryly that it almost distracted Kaoru from how unexpectedly sweet it was.

“I’d rather you had _both_.”

“Impossible.”

“We haven’t even had breakfast yet.”

Kyoya smiled, and tilted sideways, head in Kaoru’s lap. Kaoru stared at him, and couldn’t believe how alive Kyoya was, breath warm on Kaoru’s thigh and the part in his hair no longer even after all the times Kaoru gripped it with his fingers.

“It’s seven in the evening,” Kyoya mumbled, curled up like a cat.

“_Precisely_.”

Half an hour later, Kyoya was on his way home, and Kaoru stopped on the edge of the cliff of what would happen to them, looked down, and wondered if he’d break his neck if he jumped.

*

Respect is the warmest thing Kyoya feels towards Ootori Yoshio, but in their heaven of a world, it’s a most valuable sentiment one can provoke, so he suspects Ootori-san would count it as a win.

That is, if Kaoru’s opinion of him were of any importance.

Hard not to respect a man who stays at his office until dark, years after having built his imperium and years after making it one that would last forever.

Kaoru adjusts the collar of his shirt – one of his best. No tie, because he thought it would make him look too much like an argumentative lawyer, or one of those men who go from door to door trying to sell vacuum cleaners. Sometimes, his mother told him once, no elegance is elegance.

(One week ago, she inspected the blisters on his fingers, holding him by the writs, so that he could see the lunulae on his nails.

“I’m still young,” she said, and he smiled. “I won’t hand the business over that easily.”)

The receptionist frowns at him when Kaoru introduces himself.

“It’s late,” he says. He doesn’t ask if Kaoru has an appointment, which Kaoru reluctantly decides to take as a good sign.

“I’m his son’s friend,” Kaoru says, easy, all smile.

“I have to call up for someone to go and ask him if it’s alright.”

“Go ahead.”

He whistles during the phone call, pretending to inspect the modern paintings all over the walls.

He wonders if Kyoya is home already, if he’s pulling off his shoes or loosening his tie, if he’s putting his cufflinks away, if he’s found the matryoshka already.

He doesn’t check his phone.

“Hitachiin-san?”

A lady in a two-piece suit smiles at him, heels clicking. Kaoru glances at the receptionist, who won’t look at him, and shakes his head, amused.

“The very one,” he tells the woman, and pinches himself on the palm with the needle he keeps inside his shirt cuff.

“Follow me, please.”

Somewhere, someone, throws a coin.

Somewhere, a boy climbs a wall and falls, or doesn’t.

Somewhere, a boy is standing on the edge of a cliff and jumps, or chickens out.

Somewhere, a boy jumps off a cliff and dies, or not.

Somewhere, a tree falls in a forest, or doesn’t.

Somewhere, a tree falls in a forest, and it’s already made a sound.

*

“My son,” Ootori Yoshio says when Kaoru enters his office, chair facing the window and his back to the door, “has just called me to ask that I ignore whatever it is you came here to tell me.”

Kaoru smiles.

“I hope you’ll hear me out regardless,” he says, and bows, even though Ootori Yoshio won’t see.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading <3


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So that's it. I'm so so sorry for taking this long but uni finally caught up with me and I really wanted to get this chapter right. I don't know if I succeeded because it's a little experimental and I probably overdid it but I'm quite happy with it. I'll say more in the end notes but for now, thank you so much everyone who read this very inconsistently-updated story <3 I started writing this for myself but finished writing it for you <333

“He was part of my dream, of course – but then I was part of his dream, too!”

~ Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass & What Alice Found There

When Kyoya talked about Kaoru’s missing lunulae, it felt like this:

What the hell, what is he even on about, what does he care? _Why_ does he care?

(_Does_ he care?)

Observant. He’s observant. He’s water-cold and I’m pathetic and enough of that.

When Kyoya left those nesting dolls for Kaoru, it felt like this:

Layers, layers, I have layers, I am a person inside a person inside a person and he doesn’t see the person or the person inside the person, he sees the person inside the person inside the person, he sees me, here where I am down deep inside myself, where my name begins with a K like his, where even Hikaru doesn’t ever think to look for me, hide-and-seek and he’s winning, and I’ve lost, I’m lost, I’m lost and I’m f—

When Kyoya told Kaoru that he was kind, it felt like this:

fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you

When Ootori Yoshio motions for Kaoru to take a seat, it feels like this:

Checkmate, Kyoya, love.

*

“Haruhi,” Hikaru said once, stretching the vowels of her name until he sounded about five years old. “How smart am I on a scale from Tamaki to Kyoya?”

Somewhere, Tamaki sneezed, no doubt.

Haruhi replied without bothering to look up from her homework.

“You’re an easy two.”

Hikaru was trying to tie a shoelace with his tongue at the time and it might or might not have affected the verdict.

“What about me, then?” Kaoru said, blowing dust off a library book about coral reefs, which were like underwater meadows, all flower colors and metal boxes with bittersweet secrets locked inside, tempting you to take a peek through the keyhole.

Haruhi actually gave that some thought, put her own book away, and bit the tip of her pen.

“On a scale from Tamaki to Kyoya, you’re hopeless,” she decided and smiled at him all fond, so well-adjusted already, confident that they wouldn’t judge her for loving them, because they wouldn’t, not ever.

“Oi! What do you mean, hopeless?” Kaoru said, and couldn’t help laughing. Haruhi only smiled and didn’t reply, went back to her homework and kept smiling for quite a while.

Months later, a few days after that first kiss with Kyoya, pins scattered all over the floor and mannequins watching without blinking, they sat together on a bench outside the school, Haruhi and him. Kaoru shared his apple with her – they would take a bite each from opposite sides until there was only the core left.

“I’m so sorry,” Kaoru said, and Haruhi took a bite of the core, too, frowned when it proved too hard to chew.

“What for?”

“I tried to love you,” he explained. “Then I tried not to love you. Then to love you. Then to not love you. I couldn’t be sure which Hikaru would prefer me to feel.”

Haruhi watched him for a moment and then nodded. Her breath misted like a small ghost in front of her face, and Kaoru wished he could cup it in his hands and keep it.

“So which was it, in the end?” she asked, matter-of-fact, swinging her legs like a little girl.

“I still don’t know what he’d rather,” Kaoru confessed. “But I did love you, only not the way I wanted.”

“The way you still love me,” Haruhi acknowledged and— Kaoru felt so proud, thought he’d cry, almost put his hand on top of her head, thought better of it, smiled and smiled until it hurt.

“The way I still love you,” he confirmed, and it was her who put her hand on top of his head. She gave him an almost motherly smile.

“Remember when you wanted to know how smart you were on a scale from Tamaki to Kyoya, and I said hopeless?”

He nodded, taken aback.

“I only said it because what I really thought just then was that you were a three, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. It just seemed so lonely, because if Kyoya was ten, it’d mean putting seven numbers between the two of you, and I couldn’t, you know?”

Oh, how Kaoru loved her.

*

There’s a framed photo on Ootori Yoshio’s desk, and Kaoru can only see the back of it, which is just as well. He chooses to believe that it’s a photo of all the Ootori siblings that Yoshio bullied them into taking, and it doesn’t matter if he’s right or not, because Schrödinger’s cat and so on.

He takes a breath and doesn’t tell Ootori Yoshio that tiger lilies are his favorite flowers. Instead, he sells himself the way he would a car, drawing attention to all his good attributes, because he either has them or will. He thinks about that tiny matryoshka he left for Kyoya, imagines it warm inside Kyoya’s fist, and takes a chance to bet on some kind of forever.

*

“Oh, you disaster of a boy,” his mother said when she saw that Kaoru was sketching Kyoya rather than sketching dresses. “Now what?”

“I don’t know,” he said, truthfully. “_Ouch_.”

“What hurts now, idiot?” she teased, fingers on the back of his neck, tapping a rhythm too relaxed for his heart to match. “Want me to kiss it better?”

“Can’t kiss my heart better, can you,” he said, trying to sound extra whiny.

“Oh, come off it!” she snorted and bent over laughing. “Like you even have one!”

“I don’t,” he admitted easily. “I gave it away.”

“How dramatic!” his mother said, slapping him on the shoulder. “Win him over, or win your heart back, then. And if you do win him over, make sure to kiss him every now and then whenever we’ll have him over for parties. At last, something to tell the two of you devils apart by!”

He shook his head, laughed. Couldn’t not to, imagining that easy future that would happen or not, with his mother smiling at him like she knew it would.

*

“So it’s like this, then,” Ootori Yoshio says, impassive.

Kaoru spreads his hands, and he’s a sack of coins thrown onto the man’s desk, weighty enough or not.

*

Once, he and Hikaru crept into their parents’ bedroom at dawn, holding hands.

“We’re Siamese twins,” they announced once their parents woke up. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

Their father explained they weren’t Siamese twins at all, weren’t joined anywhere.

“We have a shared vein,” Hikaru explained. “It connects our bodies.”

“You can’t see it but it’s there,” Kaoru assured. “Invisible.”

“Running from me to Kaoru.”

“From Hikaru to me.”

“It stretches but it can only stretch so much before SNAP!”

“But we won’t let it snap.”

“Never.”

“_Never_.”

Years later, Hikaru was the first to stray. Haruhi was just so lovely and she crowded out all thoughts of shared veins. There had never been anyone like her: when she said Hikaru’s name, it was never a guess. Still, it took a while, because veins are more elastic than you think, and they’ll accommodate to whatever it is you choose to put them through, until they won’t.

When the vein snapped at last, Hikaru tied his end of it into a knot so he wouldn’t bleed out but Kaoru let his trail behind him as he tried to walk away from the hopelessness of it all.

That’s how Kyoya got to him, seeing that trailing vein, deciding to reach for its end and inspect it, giving it a tug.

Kaoru, lost and found like something dropped, trampled and thrown into a dusty box, waiting to be remembered. 

In Kaoru’s dreams, Kyoya would ask him, what do you want from me?

Kaoru, the trickster, disobedience itself, would say, what would you give me?

And what wonder that when Kyoya answered, it wasn’t inside a dream at all.

*

Kyoya’s kissing was different to Kyoya’s looking, no multitasking, no calculator in hand, a singular focus and some quiet insistence, like he was trying to make a point every time, winning an argument, a punctuated _there._

No matter how many times it happened – not that it happened all that often, what with their lifestyles – Kaoru couldn’t quite get used to it, and loved this incapability of his, loved the dream of managing to get used to it one day even more. He’d think, will I ever have the privilege of taking this for granted, and Kyoya’s hands would insist, _yes_, and Kaoru’s hands would insist right back, _but I won’t, not ever._

“You haven’t given this much thought, have you?” Ootori Yoshio says sternly, hands folded together, and Kaoru nods, even though he _has._ “Here’s how I see it:”

*

On the way to Ootori Yoshio’s office, Kaoru kept thinking that he, too, would love to go to Harbin.

*

When he rounds the corner, Kyoya grabs him by the collar and drags him into a spacious bathroom, patting Kaoru down as if for injuries which is— ridiculous.

“What on Earth have you _done_?”

Frantic movements and Kaoru reaches out, stills his hands.

“It’s alright.”

“What did he tell you?”

What did he tell you, not, what did you tell him.

Kaoru drags his thumb along Kyoya’s collarbone, smiles. Kyoya, too, isn’t wearing a tie. He must have been in too much of a hurry to put one on.

“I didn’t tell him anything about you,” Kaoru promises. “I only said— Well I told him about me falling in love with you, only tried to make it seem as business-like as love can get, and asked permission to at least try and – I don’t know, seduce you, I guess. Court, was the word.”

Kyoya stares at him like he hasn’t predicted it, and Kaoru smiles, because there, he’s outsmarted him at last.

“Are you _insane_?” Kyoya says, gripping him by the shoulders. “That’s like political suicide, and what do you mean you told him you’d—”

“He asked me about your sexuality, too, and I told him that, as of now, I have no reason to believe you’d even consider—”

“You’re so bloody _stupid_—”

“But he said yes!”

Kyoya lets go of him, stares.

“He said…. Yes?” he repeats, doubtful.

“Well, he let me go on and on about all the things I would do to become a valuable asset, and he said it wasn’t nowhere near good enough, so I kept suggesting more, and looks like I won’t get a wink of sleep over the next few years at least, but that’s fine by me—”

“Wait, wait, hold it,” Kyoya says, palm stretched out like he’s directing traffic. His hair is messier than usually – has he run here? – and Kaoru longs to mess it up even more. “What you’re saying is that somehow, you convinced my father to allow you to attempt to seduce me once you meet some crazy requirements, and that you’re going to be slaving away for the foreseeable future only to have a shot at – in his eyes impossible – seducing me.”

Kaoru hums.

“Pretty much,” he admits. “But don’t feel too pressured. I mean, that is, if you change your mind, or if you want— This is not binding, you can always— I—”

Kyoya tears at his hair, stares at him.

“Christ, Kaoru, what do you think, that I’ll get bored of you in a month? And so what, then, a safety exit all for myself? You can prove yourself all you want and years from now I still get to pretend to be straight and not want you back?”

Kaoru shrugs.

“I wanted to be honest without forcing you to be, too. I’m sorry if you hate me for it, and I know that the chances that you and your father both will ever agree to this are slim to none—”

Kyoya kisses him, and the kiss is a _no_.

“Listen carefully, you stupid, impulse-control-lacking brat,” Kyoya says when he pulls away, slightly out of breath. “There’s no way I’m letting you sacrifice everything like this if I’m not right there next to you doing the very same thing.”

“Potayto, potahto,” Kaoru says, and enjoys it immensely when Kyoya groans and fists his hair. It’s always a thrill to see Kyoya anything less than collected, even if it’s due to frustration, _especially_ if it’s Kaoru’s doing.

“It’s _not_,” Kyoya insists, and stares at Kaoru like he’s gone crazy, which Kaoru has. “Don’t underestimate me like this.”

“I’m not underestimating you,” Kaoru says, reaching for Kyoya’s hands. He holds him gently by the wrists, squeezes. He didn’t use to think he could ever offer reassurance, so unsure of everything himself, but he tries his best. “I’m not overestimating, you either. God knows that’s impossible. I am pretty confident that the way I see you is the way you are.”

Kyoya starts breathing more evenly, tangles his fingers with Kaoru’s for a brief moment, then lets go.

“Which is why you must already know,” he says quietly, so quiet that it doesn’t echo, “what I’m going to do.”

“Doesn’t that depend on whether I’m underestimating myself?” Kaoru says, and Kyoya shakes his head.

“Well, _don’t_.”

He marches out of the bathroom, and turns right rather than left, heading for where Kaoru came from. Kaoru follows him only halfway there, stops with his back to the wall and watches Kyoya kiss a tiny matryoshka before shoving it in his trousers pocket.

When Kyoya knocks and walks into Ootori Yoshio’s office, Kaoru shakes his head and smiles.

*

Once, with his head in Kaoru’s lap, caught halfway between asleep and awake, Kyoya mumbled that he would figure it out, he _would._

“Figure what out?” Kaoru said, brushing Kyoya’s hair off his forehead. He took off Kyoya’s glasses for him, too, folded them and put them away.

“Everything,” Kyoya promised. “I’ll figure out _everything_.”

*

When Kyoya drags Tamaki away to talk to him, Haruhi comes to stand next to Kaoru.

“Is that it, then?” she says, a chocolate smear in the corner of her mouth. Hani has corrupted her, putting samples of twenty different cakes on her plate, and she’s been eating them dutifully, rating them on a scale from one to ten. “Is he telling him?”

Before, Tamaki slung his arm across Kyoya’s shoulders, said “My friend, my brother, my wife—” and when he got to that last part and when Kaoru flung a napkin folded into a crane at him, he laughed like the happiest boy alive, but here’s a secret: he couldn’t have been one, because just then, there was no one happier than Kaoru in the whole world.

“I think he’ll probably imply it, and Tamaki will either get it or not,” Kaoru says, stealing a piece of cake off Haruhi’s plate. “Mmm, coconut.”

“So he’s not telling him, then,” Haruhi says, matter-of-fact.

“Oh, have some faith! Tono’s not _that_ stupid.”

“_I_’m the one dating him.”

“Case in point.”

She frowns like she’s trying to work out what he means, then smiles.

“So was it you or Hikaru who put the grasshopper on his saucer, then?” she asks innocently, and Kaoru laughs, remembering Tamaki’s screams and all the spilled rose tea, Kyoya already calculating the costs of getting the stains out of the upholstery.

“I thought you knew he was the meaner one?”

“You’re a menace, too,” Haruhi says. “Even if for a while there you seemed like the saddest menace I’d ever seen.”

“Well,” he says, touched that she worried. “I’m back to being a happy one.”

“I suppose you are happy,” she admits, “for someone who claims they won’t sleep for the next few years.”

“Why sleep?” Kaoru says lightly. “Kyoya, he makes the most delicious coffee.”

Haruhi shakes her head, but grabs his sleeve like a small kid and gives him a lovely smile.

“Anyway, I think we might have another trickster in our ranks, because it wasn’t me, the grasshopper, and brother dear has been missing for a while.”

“Do you want to look for him?”

“I will,” Kaoru admits. “Alone.”

He gives her a sheepish smile and she lets go of his sleeve. One day, he’s going to design her wedding dress, and she’s going to at least pretend to love it, and she’s going to look so beautiful in it that Tamaki will faint.

They will know each other forever.

The school is almost empty save for the club room, where Tamaki insisted on hosting a tea party to celebrate Kyoya’s “bold prelude to an even bolder career,” halls deserted like during summer holidays, only snow outside. It takes Kaoru a while to find Hikaru because the library is the last place he thinks to look, but there Hikaru is, cross-legged on the ground between two bookcases, a tome spread in his lap.

“‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’” he reads without looking up at Kaoru. He doesn’t have to, to know Kaoru’s there, never has. “Now what?” he asks, frowning at the copy of _Through the Looking-Glass & What Alice Found There_. He sounds like, for once, he’s the lost one, and Kaoru can’t keep a fond but selfish smile. He sits down next to Hikaru and remembers all the times he (love-)hated that stupid book, (love-)hated the depressed gnat Alice met in a train that moved like a chess pawn, (love-)hated the talking sheep and her crabs and feathers, (love-)hated those live flowers talking over each other, and finally (love-)hated Hikaru himself.

He looks for it now, checks inside himself the way you would check a pocket, and comes up empty. He has only love left, no hate.

“Now I’m going to set you up on blind dates,” Kaoru says, and turns the page, then another, then another, because they have that little bit of uninterrupted time to read it together.

By the time they get back, half the guests are gone, and Kyoya’s eyeglasses are off.

“There you are,” he says when they walk in because he was looking for Kaoru. He was looking, and it never gets old.

“At last!” Tamaki says, finger up. He doesn’t look particularly thoughtful, and Kaoru suspects that whatever Kyoya hit him with hasn’t quite gotten through, not yet. “Is it time for a toast?”

“You already gave three,” Haruhi points out, cake crumbs all over her chin. Hani looks at her like he wants to gather them with his finger and eat them, and Mori already has a calming hand on his shoulder like he knows.

“Kaoru and Kyoya deserve another one,” Tamaki says, petulant.

“Let’s save toasts for the future, when my father actually accepts this,” Kyoya says, pointing between himself and Kaoru, because they are a ‘this’ now, and because it is a matter of when, not if, or so Kaoru tells himself. They both have a lot of work to do, but who’d mind, when the reward is so sweet?

“Still, it’s a bittersweet thing, isn’t it?” Hani says, thoughtful. He frowns at the ‘bitter’ part. “Since you’ll never take over your father’s business now.”

Kyoya won’t, that much is true. Chances are he wouldn’t have, even before Kaoru, and although Kaoru believes Kyoya would, somehow, Kyoya keeps assuring him he likes it better this way. His smile, when he raises his glass, confirms it.

“Why fight for my father’s imperium,” he says with a sly smile, “when I can build my own from scratch?”

In the end, it is a toast alright.

It’s almost sunset when Kaoru and Hikaru decide to try and trick Kyoya one last time, matching hats so their hair won’t show and no need to put their hands behind their backs, since Kaoru is no longer ‘malnourished’ and has lunulae, too.

“Which one of us is Hikaru-kun?” they say in unison, and Kyoya indulges them, smiles.

“Let’s see,” he hums and looks straight at Kaoru. Later, they will keep telling each other ‘I see you’ and ‘I know you’ and ‘I understand you’ but for now, what he says is this:

“The one I’m not in love with.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bonus scene: 
> 
> (a phone call at 4 am) 
> 
> _KaOrU? ArE YoU tHeRe? Listen, listen, earlier today, me! You! K-K-KYOYA! He told me about having been in love with someone else before you and something about metal boxes, and kotatsu, and I thought— Well, I thought Haruhi, and told him DON’T YOU EVER LOCK MY GIRLFRIEND IN A BOX, and I told him to never ever break your heart but you know what, I’m starting to think— I mean, kOtAtSu?!?!?! What does that even mean? Of course, I know that I have a lovely complexion and am most lovable in general but I didn’t think…. Did he really? Was I leading him on? Oh God, I was, wasn’t I? I shouldn’t have shamelessly flaunted my beauty like th— hello? Kaoru? Did you just hang up on me? KaOrU! _
> 
> Anyway, that's it, the end. I gotta tell you, this was the most challenging fanfiction I've ever written. Maybe it sounds weird but I swear, it's true. I just kept thinking that Kyoya and Kaoru both are smarter than me and trying to write them smart in spite of not being smart myself... Also all that shit with them being from rich important families. I could never get it right which is why it was so brief here. I'm not too happy about it but if you're interested in reading something that actually gets it right, if you haven't yet, I highly recommend 'in medias res' by potionwine which I read before I even started actually shipping these two and 'The "Five Years" Game' by SedentaryZebra which is the most delicious heartfelt romantic comedy story ever and ruined all other such fanfics for me. 
> 
> As for me, I would definitely like to write more for this fandom but I don't want to make any promises because adult life is horrible. (Still, I do so want to write that one fanfic about Hikaru and Tamaki with KyoKao as an established background couple and Haruhi in love with Mei). but if you're super bored consider reading my original story please? it also has people who are much smarter than me and go to a prestigious school in it xD (Here's a link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23463895/chapters/56249917). Also sure would be nice if we finally got that anime reboot, no? I will wait for them to animate the rest of the volumes and Kaoru actually calling Kyoya cute till the end of my days,,,
> 
> Anyway, thank you so so much for reading this story!!! <3 Please let me know what you thought if you feel like it and take care! (god, I already miss writing this but a girl's gotta know when to stop)

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading and any feedback is so so appreciated! <3


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